Freeland’s Flagrantly False Farce

On Freeland’s Nonsense Claims

Chrystia Freeland is lying to Canadians.

In an interview with The House airing roughly when this column will be read and was previewed Friday, Chrystia Freeland declared herself as running in opposition to the “Ottawa establishment” and positioning herself as a candidate of change.

Chrystia Freeland. Candidate of change. “Really happy to be running against the Ottawa establishment.”

Former Deputy Prime Minister of 5 Years and Finance Minister for 4.5.

“Really happy to be running against the Ottawa establishment.”

In other news, I’m straight.

..

This is nonsensical from Freeland for obvious reasons - she’s a candidate who is as inside the Trudeau project as anybody who wasn’t in the wedding party. She was the first candidate recruited, they gifted her the Toronto Centre byelection nomination, she has been in Cabinet this whole time, Deputy Prime Minister for 5 years and always understood to be the most important person in this government. She took a “lesser” title in 2015 to close the European CETA and then handled the USMCA as Foreign Minister with aplomb. (Having read Erin O’Toole’s criticism of the USMCA this morning, it’s laughable to think any government could have done better at an unwanted negotiation. Us not getting our goals is called negotiation bullshit so the Americans feel like they won. Our purpose in that negotiation was to keep as much of the status quo as possible. We did that.)

She then became the Finance Minister who has been at the core of every big economic and fiscal policy decision of this government. She has handled the recovery from COVID, the Inflationary period, the response to the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, the response to Ukraine being invaded, all of it. She has handled some of that okay, and some of it shit. She will try, at least in theory because she’s not doing it yet, to blame the PMO for the lack of spending restraint in recent years and claim she was secretly opposed to it all. But claiming to be outside of the Trudeau project is nonsense.

Yes, certain people inside the PMO past and present support Mark Carney. Yes, a lot of the Canada 2020 people are on Carney’s side. But the idea that staff level endorsements and hires make someone an “insider” to a government they have not served in and make you an outsider is nonsensical. If the argument is Katie Telford being pro-Carney is more significant than you having been the Deputy PM for 5 years then your whole argument goes out the window.

If Chrystia Freeland is running against the political establishment she is in effect saying that everything is run from the PMO and that she was effectively a puppet. Which, who knows, maybe that’s an argument that someone could make, though I tend to think blaming the mean old PMO for your sins is a lazy and tired excuse and I definitely think that’s how it’s heard by voters. But let’s accept this premise for a second. If the PMO is all that matters, then your whole pitch is worthless!

Freeland is trying to tell us that her time in government makes her the right choice to fight Donald Trump, while also implicitly saying that the only thing that actually matters is whatever Telford thinks. She’s both a strong leader with experience and a shrinking violet who was subservient to the Ottawa Establishment for 9 years. Does nobody in her universe understand how insane this sounds?

For all the stick Mark Carney gets for his “outsider” status, the actual specific claim Carney is making is entirely true. He hasn’t served in this government, he was at the Bank Of England for the first four years of it, and he is therefore not bound to this government’s record in the way Kamala Harris - who Jon Stewart was using as a comparison point - was inextricably linked to Joe Biden. That is true! No amount of informal consulting work or heading up the party’s Economic Advisory Committee or whatever the fuck changes the basic point that when Mark Carney says the government got something wrong you can’t say “but you were responsible for it!” like you can with Freeland. That’s just true!

Carney isn’t pretending he’s some Everyman, he’s taking the JB Pritzker approach to politics - “I’m an elite who could just stay in the private sector and make millions more, but I know how the deck is stacked against you so I’m coming into politics to try and unstack it.” He’s not lying to us, he’s being completely honest about who he is and why he’s here. There’s no effort to mislead. Now, whether or not Carney will save the day or not is up for debate, sure, but the fundamental premise of Freeland’s campaign is bullshit in a way that Carney’s not.

The honest truth is that Chrystia’s campaign is suffering from the thing that has been obvious to me since I tried and failed to make the case for her over two weeks ago. The case for her, going into an election where the country wants change, doesn’t exist. Carney gives us a chance. Freeland doesn’t. This is a campaign that doesn’t know what it’s doing. Everybody’s favourite game in Ottawa right now is wondering what on earth she’s doing, because it seems so ludicrous to everyone outside the tent that we all keep asking ourselves some version of “what are we missing?” because we assume we’re all having some mass delusion. But we’re not.

The candidate who hired Tom Allison, who worked for Bonnie Crombie until he was demoted and who worked for Ignatieff and Wynne, cannot be an anti-establishment fighter. The candidate running on experience in government cannot also be a change candidate. The candidate of Cut Disney+ To Fight Inflation cannot be the candidate for this moment. The Ukrainian history buff who either knowingly clapped for a Nazi or didn’t know what “fought the Soviets in World War II” meant cannot be the candidate for this moment. It’s pathetic, it’s hurtful, and it’s not good enough.

This leadership race should be a sharp battle about the future of the Liberal Party and the country. Freeland’s willingness to gaslight us is turning it into a farce. For her own reputation, and the good of the country, she should stop lying to us and pretending she is something she isn’t.

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