Freeland’s departure sharp rebuke for Trudeau

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This article was published 17/12/2024 (319 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What better way is there to stick a fork into your boss than resigning barely an hour before you were supposed to make an important and very public presentation on his behalf?

Enter — or maybe, more properly, exit — federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland.

Freeland resigned on Monday morning, just before she was set to deliver the fall economic statement on behalf of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government. The move came, Freeland said, after she was told Friday that Trudeau intended to move her out of the finance portfolio and into a different cabinet post, a move that would almost certainly serve to ensure that she would be scapegoated for the contents of the economic update. (Trudeau moving her from finance would obviously be seen as a statement that she had lost his confidence in the portfolio, and would also be a brazen effort to turn the political page. Freeland would wear the blame, even if, for fiscal reasons, she had fought hard against particular spending moves demanded by the prime minister.)

Freeland was clearly in no mood to make the resignation in any way diplomatic.

On her X/Twitter account, she pointed Canadians directly to her one-page resignation letter, where she said that threats from U.S. president-elect Donald Trump about imposing a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian exports to the U.S. was a critical threat to the economy.

“That means keeping our fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war,” Freeland wrote. “That means eschewing costly political gimmicks, which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment.”

Those unspecified “gimmicks”? Well, she didn’t say in so many words, but the Trudeau government’s GST break on some goods from Dec. 14 until February, and its plan to issue $250 cheques to all Canadians working in 2023, certainly fits the bill.

The move came mere moments after one of the federal government’s most effective ministers, federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser, announced he would not be running in the next federal election, using that oh-so-common reason that he wanted to spend more time with his family.

It looks like the most important of wheels are coming off the Liberal bus, at the worst possible time.

Whether you like Freeland or not, it’s clear that the last time Donald Trump was president, and the last time Canada’s ability to sell into the U.S. market was threatened, Freeland played an absolutely crucial part in trade negotiations that protected this country’s access to its largest customer. Almost certainly, Canada would be better off to have had her experience and skills in dealing with the current threats of U.S. tariff attacks on Canadian producers and exporters.

But it’s not to be.

“Inevitably, our time in government will come to an end,” Freeland also said in her resignation letter. “But how we deal with the threat our country currently faces will define us for a generation, and perhaps longer. Canada will win if we are strong, smart, and united.”

Ministers have quit on Trudeau before, some of them in big, public and messy ways. But when they did, he was much more firmly in command of his party and the government.

It’s hard not to see this as a near-certain fatal blow for the Trudeau government — and one that should have Justin Trudeau questioning what his next political steps should be. Instead, crickets. At the deadline for this page, Trudeau had not indicated his next move.

There’s snow somewhere in Canada to walk in, Mr. Trudeau. Just a thought.