Foreign Interference: Freeland Knows Better

On Freeland’s Dumb Populist Bullshit

Of all people, I’d think that Chrystia Freeland would know better than most the danger of believing unverified intelligence. Her grandfather’s history, rather famously, has been the subject of smear campaigns designed to discredit her, based on a nominally correct statement of an allegedly incomplete set of facts. Per Freeland’s family history, her Ukrainian grandfather, who worked at a newspaper that was overtaken by the Nazis and used as a propaganda arm, helped the resistance against Nazism while nominally collaborating with them to stay alive. Assuming the story her grandfather told is right, the demonstrable facts are both eminently true, and also entirely misleading.

It’s with that backdrop I find Freeland’s politicization of today’s Hogue Commission report into Foreign Interference so baffling. She has three action items, things she will do immediately in the unlikely event she becomes Prime Minister. The third one is whatever - making sure CSIS tells party leaders about allegations is fine. But the first two are nonsensical.

Her big announcement was that she would declassify all information about foreign interference in the last two decades of elections … “while ensuring that sources and methods and any information that would be harmful to our allies is protected”. So, either Chrystia Freeland when she says she’ll be declassifying all or even most intelligence, or she is going to declassify a ton of unverified information that police services and CSIS have decided don’t meet the threshold for criminal behaviour and declare open season on the names implicated, whether it’s a baseless smear or a credible allegation.

Either she’s not actually stupid enough to have seen the way that Han Dong has been treated and knows that her definition of declassifying “all” intelligence and evidence is not even remotely close to all of it, or she’s willing to let us have endless numbers of Han Dong situations of mediocre to bad intelligence smearing him. She either doesn’t care about the truth or she doesn’t care about the cloud that would be put over any number of MPs, and she especially doesn’t seem to get that you would instantly create a political incentive to play party political games with intelligence. I must confess to not knowing what’s more terrifying.

But somehow that is not the part of this that has me most mad. Point number two reads that she will “immediately require all party leaders in Parliament to obtain Top Secret security clearance and attend regular intelligence briefings.” It’s an admirable goal - Pierre Poilievre should get his clearance! - but it’s also one of the dumbest things ever proposed. She will “immediately require” him to get one? How the fuck is she going to do that? Does Chrystia Freeland - allegedly one of the smartest minds this country has produced in decades - think that Prime Ministers can just declare things? Does she also think declaring bankruptcy works like on The fucking Office?

Let’s take her dumbass idea seriously, right - let’s say she wins the Leadership, she becomes Prime Minister, and issues a sweeping order to declassify documents. What does she even do to “immediately require” Poilievre to get a clearance? Parliament won’t be back yet, so she can’t pass a law to require it, and any order she tried to give would be laughed at. So what are we even talking about? Is she going to call Pierre Poilievre and say “you need to get a security clearance or else”? If she does that and he says no what’s she gonna fucking do about it, send a JTF2 unit to Stornoway?

I will fully admit I am being an asshole about this but the reason I’m being one, and the reason I feel justified in being this over the top with it, is simple - she is a former Deputy Prime Minister of this country using intelligence and national security as a political pawn and doing it in the dumbest way possible. It is eminently clear that Freeland has not thought through those ideas for more than 3 seconds because if she did she’d realize they’re insanely stupid. It’s unbecoming of someone offering themselves as a leader to be cavalier and this insipid, and it’s especially embarrassing when you’re trying to run against a Conservative Party you have routinely maligned for their lack of intellectual heft and the driving out of genuine conservative intellectualism. You don’t get to pretend you’re better than them and then do this.

The real crisis at the heart of Chrystia Freeland’s campaign is that they know that the authentic version of Freeland, campaigning on her actual record and her actual values and her actual experience, would be dead in the water amongst both the membership and the country. The fact that they’re pretending that the Chrystia Freeland of 2013-December 15th 2024 and the Freeland since 9:00AM on the 16th are different people is proof they know they’ve got a slow horse. And they’re just trying to make the most of an obviously terrible candidate.

It’s sad, on some level, to see a candidate like Freeland disgrace herself like this, and that’s what she’s doing. The other part of this is that she’s continuing to show an incredible amount of contempt for Canadians. She’s lying to us, pretending that the only thing standing between Pierre Poilievre getting a security clearance is Justin Trudeau being too much of a pussy to make Poilievre get one. She’s not saying that directly, but the implication that she can immediately make Poilievre get one is that Trudeau has some secret button in Rideau Cottage and is just refusing to press it. It’s so ludicrous, and so offensive to Canadians.

I think some people are getting my problems with Freeland backwards - I’m not saying this because I support Mark Carney, I support Mark Carney in large part because of the problems with Freeland. This wasn’t a situation where I was head over heels for Carney, though I have actually been more impressed by Carney than I was expecting when I wrote that column. The fundamental problem I faced when I thought about who to choose is that Freeland is a flawed candidate who cannot represent change. I just didn’t expect her campaign to so blatantly fuck this up. It’s a bad candidate running an even worse campaign. I’m stunned.

Or, I would be, if this wasn’t a Tom Allison classic. Freeland’s choice to throw her lot in with such an odious and incompetent strategist is a classic example of what is ailing this campaign - it’s just quite crap, really. Good to see Tom’s still able to take a frontrunner and fuck it all up, as he did in Mississauga. Let’s see if he can come in third again, shall we?

But beyond that, Freeland’s statement on Foreign Interference today was disqualifying. It was political when we needed stately, nonsensical when we needed seriousness, and populist drivel at a time when we need gravitas. Freeland is better than this. Or, at least, she was.