Freeland Needs A Better Message

On Her Candidacy Without A Country

One of the things that is emerging about this leadership is that Chrystia Freeland seems to think - for good or ill! - that reminding people that she resigned, and the general circumstances of that resignation, are good for her. When asked what she would do differently than the PM yesterday, she answered that she wouldn’t tell her Finance Minister she was going to be fired days before having to deliver an economic statement. It’s a funny line, at least if you don’t think too much about it. But if you do, it’s insane that she keeps picking at this thread.

Let’s be clear about the facts here. Chrystia Freeland didn’t resign because the government wanted to spend desperately needed fiscal headroom on a “costly political gimmick”. She didn’t resign because she refused to enact the “costly political gimmick”. She resigned because she was told she was going to be fired. The official narrative - based on her letter and the subsequent reporting - seems to be that if Trudeau had responded to her rejection of the amorphous Minister For Canada US Relations job by saying “fine, you can stay at Finance, you’re too valuable to lose entirely”, she would still be in Cabinet. Presumably she’d be currently shilling for that “costly political gimmick” of a GST holiday right now.

The reason I want to litigate this is that Freeland’s case for herself relies on the idea that she made a principled stand to separate herself from Justin Trudeau - that the way the party and the country can know she’s not Just Like Justin, to quote the Conservatives - is entirely bullshit. She resigned rather than being fired. And that’s fine! I would have quit Monday morning too rather than deliver a Fall Economic Statement I didn’t believe in. But the idea that she resigned out of principled disagreement is laughable.

If Chrystia Freeland wants to be a serious contender in a general election, if she gets there - and Lord knows the last day or so isn’t a great time for her chances, which we’ll get to - then she needs a better answer on why she resigned. More bluntly, she needs an answer that isn’t about why she resigned but rather about why she waited so fucking long.

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Freeland’s whole candidacy is stuck in neutral, and the problem is I don’t think there’s anything she can do about it. She’s a candidate who cannot be continuity Trudeau because she resigned but she resigned so late in the game that any argument that she is a Different Kind Of Liberal falls flat. She’s a candidate whose theory of the case is that there’s a group of people who really, really hate Trudeau, but somehow think they have the political memory of a goldfish that inoculates her from it. It’s nonsensical and it's floundering.

Some Liberals I respect have more time for Freeland than I do - and let’s be clear, I stand by having first written that the PM should fire her in October 2023 - and I’ve always been fighting that fact implicitly. I don’t get the Freeland thing at all, and haven’t for years. She is the Finance Minister who invoked Disney+ in a conversation about the cost of living and inflation. She’s tied to the PM whose approvals are in the toilet.

I said this on the Scrimshaw Show last week but I tried to make the case for Freeland on the site as an intellectual exercise, and I gave up about 300 words in because it wasn’t true. She cannot be the change we need in an election where only 12% of voters believe that the government deserves to be re-elected, per Abacus. But she is also not a good advocate if you genuinely think the only problem with this government is the leader, which leaves her in the weird position of having to run against Donald Trump and not Mark Carney.

But even then, the logic is lacking! If you want Canada to be in a good position, why would picking a Prime Minister that Donald Trump hates be a good thing? It might make us feel good, but if politics are about outcomes, and the Americans are led by a man child who bases all of his decisions in part on who has most recently made him feel like a special special boy who can do no wrong, isn’t electing Freeland Liberal Leader effectively guaranteeing crippling tariffs with no chance of removal until Poilievre wins?

It’s also not like Freeland is having a particularly good campaign - her launch issues are (mostly) not her own fault, but Melanie Joly and Steven Guilbeault are big name Quebec MPs going for Carney who deliver him a lot of credibility from the left of the party and a lot of cover in Quebec media, and especially French media. (Do I despise both of them and regularly wonder how anyone takes this government seriously with these two chucklefucks in Cabinet? Yes. Are they good endorsements? Yes. Does the two of them agreeing with me on Carney make me want to drink? Oh yes it does.)

Two of Freeland’s past or present Parliamentary Secretaries have endorsed Carney today, more notably Sean Fraser. Today alone has seen four past or present Cabinet Ministers endorse Carney. The people who would know Freeland best are on Team Carney. On the other hand, Randy Boissonault and Anthony Housefather is an incredible haul of talents, a fraud who falsely claimed Indigenous status to get a government contract and a man who claims to care so much about antisemitism and standing for the Jewish community he chose to support the woman who touts her deep understanding of Ukrainian history and yet claims she doesn’t know that having “fought the Soviets in World War 2” makes them a Nazi.

I would love to make Freeland’s failures a crisis for the (absolutely horrible) staff choice she made, and I will enjoy getting to make fun of Tom Allison for losing this one for years to come, but I don’t actually think she’s botching a race she should win. The more I think about Freeland the more I can’t actually articulate a case for her. Freeland is stuck, unable to be anything to anybody in this race. She’s not the insider, she’s not the outsider, she’s not the generational change candidate, and Carney’s explicit, gloves off statement on Trump means she’s not even the only one willing to fight for Canada. Freeland, in so many ways, is a candidate without a country. She needs a better pitch fast if she wants this to be even remotely close.