Catherine Tsalikis began contemplating a biography of Chrystia Freeland in August 2020, when Freeland, already deputy prime minister, took on the role of finance minister. At the time, Freeland was seen as a leading contender to succeed Justin Trudeau as Liberal Party leader, with many assuming her rise to the top was only a matter of time. What no one could have predicted, however, was how it would happen: her resignation from cabinet exactly a month ago setting off a political chain reaction, leading to Trudeau’s January 6 announcement that he would step down. As Freeland prepares to launch her expected leadership campaign, Tsalikis’s Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill has become a timely must-read on one of the Liberal Party’s strongest contenders in the upcoming battle against Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. Tsalikis and I spoke earlier this week over Zoom. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
What do you think would make Chrystia Freeland want to run for the Liberal leadership now, especially given the Liberals are polling so low?
I’ve been asked a lot over the past few weeks: Do I think that she’s going to throw her hat in the ring? I don’t think she knew up until very recently. But I was of two minds. I thought, yes, it makes sense. As this ambitious, accomplished woman finds herself with the leadership within reach, why not throw her hat in the ring? And when the opportunity presents itself, maybe you grab it and you run with it.
But on the other hand, the Liberals are facing certain defeat in the next federal election—whoever becomes leader of the Liberal Party. Yes, they become prime minister for a few weeks at best, but then they will be immediately thrown into an election that the Conservatives seem likely to win. At best, they’re facing years in opposition wilderness. So that’s what she’s running for: to be leader of, at best, the opposition party. Knowing what I do of her, having spoken to so many people who know her, who have watched her work over the course of her life and her career, my best guess would be that she feels a sense of duty to the party and to the country.
Canada’s always been an integral part of her identity, and she really believes that we can make a difference in the world, and that she can make a difference here. Friends have told me they don’t see her, even after an electoral defeat, leaving the country to go work in the private sector in the US, where she would just be one of many. Here in Canada, she is a big fish, and she can make a difference. So perhaps she sees it as her duty to take the mantle of this party and give them a fighting shot against Pierre Poilievre. Maybe she believes she can be a match for him, but also perhaps she can see herself being the one to rebuild the party after this. That’s not nothing.
The comparisons with Kim Campbell are inevitable: Campbell was Canada’s first (and so far only) female prime minister, serving in the role for less than five months, in 1993. What would Freeland have to do to get past the comparison?
When I was doing these interviews [for the book], people would say, “Oh, you’re writing a book about Canada’s next prime minister.” It was an exciting prospect to many people. I can’t believe that now we find ourselves in a position where we could plausibly have a female prime minister again in this country, and she’s facing exactly the same situation, the same denouement, as Kim Campbell. I don’t know how you get away from those comparisons. They’re almost uncanny. Campbell was an accomplished minister in her own right, was a casualty of her party’s terrible polling numbers, its low popularity. It’s another instance of a woman coming in, cleaning up, having to do the best she can with the situation that she has, and not being given enough runway to make any sort of effective change.
I don’t know how [Freeland] gets away from this. I think she will try and distance herself from Trudeau’s track record—which will be difficult, because it is her track record. There was no daylight between the two of them on policy that I could uncover throughout their almost decade in government. The way in which she resigned, I think, might create a bit of distance, perhaps in the mind of the public and minds of voters, but she will have an uphill battle.
She could try and position herself as the person who is best placed to take on Donald Trump. We have a looming trade war, threats to Canada’s sovereignty or economy coming from the next president of the United States. She has proven that she is able to take him on and come out with a good outcome. I’m referring to the NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] renegotiations under the first Trump presidency. She drew his ire. He called her a “nasty woman,” which she wore as a badge of honour, so she could make the case that she has dealt with a Trump administration effectively and could do so again. But I don’t know. I will leave that, I think, for the political strategists.
For the book, you interviewed former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, who had a lot of positive things to say about Freeland. She also has a seemingly good relationship with Ontario premier Doug Ford, whom she famously described as her “therapist” during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. How do you think these across-the-aisle relationships might affect her standing in the race, both as a contender for the Liberal leadership and potentially in a federal election?
One thing that came across in my interviews with people who know her is her ability to make connections with people. In Kyiv in the early ’90s as a brand new journalist, she always had the scoops. People in power wanted to speak with her before anyone else. But it was because she would prepare. She knew what she was talking about. She would do the work.
But also, she’s warm. I don’t think this comes across necessarily in her public persona, but people describe her as having a sense of humour. Former cabinet minister Bill Graham told me that she’s a bit mischievous. She has a twinkle in her eyes, and she really likes people. Someone she managed at Reuters in New York told me that she has an uncanny ability to modulate herself to whoever she’s speaking with. So whether that was him, the colleague, who was this “kid from Italy,” as he described himself, or the prime minister of Ukraine, say—across the board, she’s able to make these connections. She has a certain charm. I think that that came in handy a lot when she was in Moscow [in the ’90s] and reporting on the oligarchs. She would kind of disarm them with her charm, and they wouldn’t realize that she was committing everything they said to memory and was going to write about it the next day for the Financial Times.
But she has detractors.
Detractors would say she comes off as a little bit schoolmarm-y or could be condescending and aloof. It’s not the picture that people have painted to me. In government, you saw her ability to build coalitions. There’s a few instances of that, I think—most prominently during the NAFTA renegotiations. She coordinated this whole government approach. And that was politicians, business leaders, prominent intellectuals, across the political spectrum, in the [pursuit] of this one goal, which was to come out of that with a deal that was good for Canada.
Former finance minister Bill Morneau was in favour of coming into a deal more quickly, maybe making some concessions to the Trump team early to avoid a long, dragged-out, protracted negotiation. Chrystia, on the other hand, thought, No, we don’t want to say yes to a quick deal. We want to hold out for a good deal. And so what she did was work her way in government. She spoke with [Trudeau’s chief of staff] Katie Telford, she spoke with [then principal secretary] Gerry Butts, she spoke with our ambassador to the US at the time, David MacNaughton. She built her case and she presented it to the prime minister, who still hadn’t made up his mind on which direction he wanted to go. And in the end, he sided with Chrystia. And this is, like, a perfect example of how she goes about stuff.
In this context, I can see her working the phones, utilizing this expansive network that she has, both here in Canada and internationally. She can call on some very powerful and influential people to be in her camp. I’m thinking of financier George Soros, former US secretary of the treasury Larry Summers, past and present leaders of countries, finance ministers in different countries. These are people who I’ve spoken with, many of them, and they all had no difficulty believing that she would someday be a leader of this country.
I feel like where she will run into some difficulty is this public perception. You saw the reaction to Mark Carney being on The Daily Show; people are looking at that and saying, Oh, look at him. He’s so funny, he’s so cool, he seems so easy to speak with, so personable. I don’t know if she has a likability problem, and it wouldn’t be surprising given the reaction that many female politicians face when they’re in public. For whatever reason, her accomplishments and the really impressive things that she has done over the course of her life and career—I don’t know that that necessarily translates to the public. She doesn’t have the charisma of the early Justin Trudeau, or the ability to rouse a crowd. I don’t think those are her strengths. But she is a very intelligent, accomplished, hard-working woman, and so she’ll have to make that case. Her track record might speak for itself to voters and to her colleagues in the Liberal Party, but I think there’ll be some work to do there.
There’s a pattern of successful Liberal leaders being francophones from Quebec. Freeland is from Peace River, Alberta. She grew up partly in Edmonton. She’s also of Ukrainian heritage and has been active in providing aid to Ukraine amid the war with Russia. Could she buck tradition and be popular as a Liberal leader in the West, especially in Prairie provinces where there’s a large Ukrainian diaspora? Or is the Liberal brand so tarnished out west that these factors might not matter?
That’s something I think about a lot. She considers herself to be a very proud daughter of Alberta. Her childhood in Peace River, about five hours north of Edmonton, is an integral part of her story. People who knew her at Harvard, at Oxford, later when she was working at the Globe and Mail—they said that’s the part of her life that that she refers to, that’s the story she tells about herself. Her father is still there. She visits often. It’s not like she moved away to Harvard and never came back. She has strong roots in the province, but whether that would be enough to overcome the strong dislike of the Liberal brand, I don’t know.
There was an incident where she was back home in Alberta [in August 2022] and she was accosted by this man, in the lobby of a building as she was entering the elevator, calling her a traitor and telling her to get out of Alberta. I don’t know how indicative that is of wider sentiment, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she got caught up in this negative feeling that people in Western Canada have [against the Trudeau government’s policies].
What do you think her sense of Poilievre would be? Trudeau and Poilievre have such a clear mutual animosity. If Freeland were elected Liberal leader, what would that rapport be like?
One thing I found interesting when doing my research for this book was she has said multiple times that she subscribes to the theory of positive intent. She believes strongly that you should give the other side the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. And she has tried to stick with that through her political career. Early on as an MP, I think she was struck by the negativity in the House of Commons. She got up to give her first speech in the House of Commons and she was shouted down by the Conservatives and told to use her “big-girl voice”—and other sexist remarks. I think that that was a rude awakening for her.
She doesn’t really engage in ad hominem attacks. She tries not to be, I think, publicly negative about her opponents. She’s not a Pollyanna, obviously; there have been comments that she probably wasn’t proud of afterwards. I’m thinking about a comment about Poilievre and his makeup. That seemed out of character. But Poilievre is so different. He thrives on negative attacks. He loves giving people little nicknames and needling them, going for maximum effect in these reactions, and he has had no compunction about making personal attacks [against] the prime minister.
It’s a cliche now, but politics is so polarized nowadays. Will she be able to stay above that fray and do politics in the manner in which she really wants to? I’m not sure. It’ll be interesting to see even with Carney, [the] presumed other frontrunner—they’re family friends. He’s godfather to her youngest child. But how do you civilly make the case that you are sufficiently different from each other? I feel like that’ll be something interesting to watch too. How do you run a campaign that’s positive in an age where everything about politics feels so negative? It’ll be a challenge.
We’ve talked about her relationship with Conservatives. What about within the Liberal Party? If she were elected leader, what do you think would be the reaction within the party?
When I was interviewing people on her time in government, I asked this question: How are her relations with caucus, with her fellow cabinet ministers? I spoke with people in the PMO [Prime Minister’s Office], particularly Trudeau’s current deputy chief of staff Brian Clow. I also spoke with Katie Telford, who had really wonderful things to say about her.
I know that she has good relations with cabinet members Anita Anand, Francois-Philippe Champagne. And Dominic Barton, the former US ambassador to China, told me that she and Anita were the duo that got shit done during COVID. They work together so well. Maryam Monsef, who is no longer in cabinet, spoke of her in the warmest terms, saw her as a mentor. Mary Ng, another minister—they’re close. They would have hot pot in Mary’s condo, during the [later days of COVID], when it was lonely and it was nice to be able to share a meal together. They would talk about their hopes and worries for the Canadian economy.
Of course, she has her detractors. I would say she doesn’t suffer fools easily, and sometimes that is very apparent. And so there are people in government who perhaps she just doesn’t have time for and was not good at hiding that. I was told during the negotiations on the child care deal she really played point on that, but she also stepped in and took charge of areas of the file that might have belonged to other ministers, and that ruffled some feathers, but that was the way that she saw to get that done most effectively. In caucus, I got a sense that there was some resentment over her access to Justin Trudeau. Other ministers could never meet with the prime minister, and she sat down with him weekly.
I haven’t done more recent interviews to say, Okay, who’s gonna support her? I wouldn’t be surprised to see many of her former cabinet colleagues throwing their support behind her, given what she has accomplished for this government, but perhaps they’re going to throw their support behind whoever they think has the best chance of pulling their party out of the mess that it has found itself in.
And so let’s say she’s elected Liberal leader. She has to survive a confidence vote in March. What do you think her best chance of that would be, or what would she have to do to survive that?
I don’t think there’s much any future Liberal leader can do in terms of staving off a vote of no confidence. The government could fall on a new throne speech, on an opposition motion, a supply issue—any of these things could happen immediately. I was struck by the wording that Mark Carney used on The Daily Show. He said that the next Liberal leader will decide the timing of the next election. So it’s possible that whoever gets in could pre-empt this no-confidence issue and just call an election. Maybe that’s the move, I don’t know. But otherwise, they’re not going to have a lot of runway to convince the Canadian public that they are radically different than the former leader who so many Canadians have soured on.
And the immediate threat is really coming from the south of us. Donald Trump is going to be inaugurated on Monday. I think, on day one, that’s [Freeland’s] priority. And trying her best to put a bit of distance between her and Justin Trudeau.
What do you think dealing with Trump would be like for Freeland in term two, if she becomes Liberal leader?
She’s done it before. The manner in which she conducted the NAFTA negotiations was to rely on facts, evidence, numbers, try and make the case for people who matter in the US that our trade relationship is beneficial to Americans, that NAFTA is an agreement worth saving. Her strategy there was almost to go around him. Donald Trump wasn’t the one who was doing the practical negotiating. The people who were doing that, led by US trade representative Robert Lighthizer—she came out of these negotiations almost friends with them. I didn’t speak with Lighthizer, but [a source on his team] says she had him over for Alberta roast beef afterwards—like, she cooked him a meal in her house. He said, We loved Chrystia and we appreciated that she didn’t hold Donald Trump’s erraticness or whatever against them. And he was one of the ones who said, I could see [her] leading her country.
The point here is she has a history of being able to work with difficult men and come out on top by going to these journalistic lessons: going to the source, working with the people with whom she can get things done. She has a lot of connections in the US. When Trump was voted in, in the first [term], the Canadian government panicked because they realized they had not planned for this, and they had no connections to any of Trump’s team. It was she who put them in touch with Jared Kushner, who she was introduced to by friends in her New York circle when she was visiting journalists there. Kushner put them in touch with members of Trump’s transition team.
It’s a different group of people around Trump this time. She’ll draw on her connections in the US to try and mitigate the worst of the president’s impulses, but she’s not a wallflower. She will stand up for Canada’s interests. I don’t think you would see her, like Trudeau, running to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring, laughing nervously while Donald Trump mused about making Canada the fifty-first state. She’s built a team before, this team Canada. If that doesn’t work, she has said her first policy promise is to impose retaliatory dollar-for-dollar tariffs on the United States. If they’re going to impose their 25 percent tariff on our goods, we’re going to do the same to them. Which is what happened during the NAFTA [renegotiations], when the US imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum. She was very forceful, saying the fact that the US would consider us a security threat is unacceptable but we’re going to respond the way we need to respond. We will not be pushed around. So I feel like she’s come out of the gate swinging.
Is there anything else you want to add?
It’s almost poetic. That she would be the one to finally get Justin Trudeau to do what so many in caucus had wanted him to do—it’s almost Shakespearean. That his right-hand woman, his top lieutenant, would be the one to unravel all of this.
At Harvard, she used to joke that she didn’t want to be foreign minister of Canada because Canada was too small for her. So even then, her friends said, Coming from anybody else, that would be ridiculous, but from Chrystia, we got it. And here she is, with the prime ministership within grasp. I feel like she’s been preparing for this for her entire life, in a way.
