Chrystia Freeland Joins Contest to Replace Canada’s Trudeau
(Bloomberg) -- Chrystia Freeland, the former Canadian finance minister who helped bring Justin Trudeau’s political career to an end when she resigned in December, has joined the race to replace him as prime minister.
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Freeland, 56, announced her candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal Party in a social media post Friday, betting that she can reverse the downward trend in opinion polls that has put the governing party on course for defeat in an election this year.
She’ll be up against Mark Carney, the former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor, who formally started his campaign on Thursday.
The winner will become prime minister in March, but odds are good that person will have to fight an election soon after, as the major opposition parties have all said they plan to vote to bring down the government.
“I’m running to fight for Canada,” Freeland posted on X.
The contest is shaping up to be a fight over economic issues — in particular how to handle Donald Trump’s threat to impose 25% tariffs on goods the US imports from Canada. The US president-elect went as far as suggesting his administration would use “economic force” to turn Canada into a 51st state. Carney said in a speech Thursday that he plans to be “completely focused on getting our economy back on track.”
Freeland published an opinion piece on Friday stating that she favors retaliatory tariffs.
“If President Trump imposes 25% tariffs, our counterpunch must be dollar-for-dollar — and it must be precisely and painfully targeted,” she wrote in the Toronto Star newspaper.
Freeland enjoys greater name recognition among Canadians than most other current and former members of Trudeau’s government. But her close ties with the unpopular prime minister may be seen as a liability.
She occupied a series of high-profile posts since Trudeau and the Liberals swept to power in 2015, including trade minister, foreign affairs minister and finance minister. For five years, Freeland was also deputy prime minister.
But she helped bring Trudeau down with a stunning resignation letter on Dec. 16 that implied the prime minister wasn’t doing the right things to prepare for the second Trump administration. “We need to take that threat extremely seriously,” she said in the letter. “That means eschewing costly political gimmicks.”
“If she’s got a problem, it’s that she didn’t jump early enough and she’s unable to strike a policy profile, a public profile, separate from the government that she’s been intimately involved with,” Dennis Pilon, chair of the politics department at York University, said in an interview before Freeland’s formal declaration on Friday.
Trudeau triggered the Liberal race on Jan. 6 when he announced he will resign once his successor is chosen. After nine years in power, his party is trailing the Conservative Party by more than 20 points in recent public opinion polls.
If elected by Liberal members, Freeland would become the first female leader in the party’s history and the second woman to be Canadian prime minister. In 1993, Kim Campbell, a conservative politician, held power for a little more than four months before losing an election.
Ukraine Ally
Born to a Ukrainian mother in the province of Alberta, Freeland studied Russian history and literature at Harvard. There, she became friends with Larry Summers, who went on to become US Treasury Secretary. She then was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford. She speaks five languages, according to her website: English, French, Ukrainian, Russian and Italian.
Freeland became a journalist, rising quickly to senior roles at the Financial Times and Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper before age 35. She has also authored books on the end of communism in Russia and wealth inequality. The latter, titled Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, proved to be her launching pad into politics.
She was recruited by Trudeau and won a seat in parliament in 2013, two years before he led the Liberals to power. She spearheaded Canada’s side in the renegotiation of the North American trade agreement during Donald Trump’s first term and largely succeeded: afterward, a Canadian magazine ran a portrait of her on the cover with the words, “You’re welcome, Canada.”
After she stepped down in December, Trump attacked her on social media, calling her a “toxic” negotiator.
She has also been at the forefront of Canada’s foreign policy on Ukraine, pushing hard for sanctions against Russia.
--With assistance from Stephen Wicary and Thomas Seal.
(Updates with additional information beginning in the fifth paragraph.)
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