Freeland Lectures America. But What is Her Record?

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Daily Gleaner

After a sudden political retirement in Canada, former finance minister Chrystia Freeland has made a leap back onto the American media stage. She’s done the rounds on U.S. TV, including the big political talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, presenting as a kind of elder stateswoman: someone who’s been in the room and can point to what’s coming next in our uncertain, tumultuous time.

 Her latest appearance is an op-ed piece in the New York Times, the country’s premier newspaper, entitled “The Great Capitulation Is Over. What Will Take Its Place?” It purports to be a thesis about the world moving from a state of helplessness, in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s various foreign policy moves, to a more united and courageous front.

 Readers may agree or disagree that this is what’s happening internationally. But one could be forgiven for being skeptical about Freeland’s political position and interest in the issues she’s talking about. In fact, Freeland’s argument is not principally a reasoned case about the state of the world, but a partisan appeal to U.S. voters for the Democratic party, which is gearing up for mid-term election season.

 Whatever their politics, her American audience deserves to know what Canadians already do: namely, that her record in government in this country is deeply spotty, and the very matters on which she claims expertise she in fact has almost no credibility.

 The era of Freeland Liberalism in Canada began in an old, pre-MAGA world. Her boss, former prime minister Justin Trudeau, rose to prominence when the Grits had been reduced to a small parliamentary caucus. In the 2015 election campaign, Trudeau outmuscled the opposition New Democrats as the change option to defeat former prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.

 It is fascinating how things have changed. Since, we have seen around the Western world a heightened skepticism of immigration, a rejection of globalism and elite institutions like the World Economic Forum, and backlash against energy policy centred more on environmental aims than the economy or security.

 Yet instead of reckoning with the heart of these developments, Freeland puts lipstick on them. She claims Trump’s victory over former vice-president Kamala Harris in 2024 “should not be understood as a secular or global shift toward the extreme right by the populace itself.” Meanwhile, she admits that “making market democracy work for working people is a daunting challenge, but it is hardly a new one.”

 You’d think, reading her article, that Freeland had nothing to do with the past decade of policymaking. Yet the populist backlash she dismisses did not arise in a vacuum. It emerged after years of policy choices by governments like her own: large-scale immigration without corresponding housing supply, unprecedented pandemic-era monetary expansion, surging housing costs, and public spending at levels even her successor, Mark Carney, has described as unsustainable.

 Perhaps the most important indicator is Canada’s falling living standards, the consequence of lost productivity gains. As of 2024, our per-person GDP (a broad measure of living standards) stood at US$51,649, a mere 3.2 per cent higher than in 2014, according to data from the Fraser Institute. Contrast that with the U.S., which had per-person GDP of $72,350, which is 20.2 per cent higher than it was in 2014, and is now 40.1 per cent higher than in Canada.

 In other words, Americans enjoyed growth in their living standards at almost six-times the rate we have seen over the last decade or so, and now have living standards 40 per cent higher than us.

 This is the record of Freeland’s time in office, which originated in Canada’s own policy choices, not pressure from Washington.

 The project, then, of “making market democracy work for working people” is in fact a correction to the circumstances Freeland helped create. What business does she have telling us how to fix the economy when she was part of the group that broke it?

 Freeland’s op-ed also glosses over a number of inconvenient realities. She praises China for resisting Trump, noting only that it is “hardly an avatar of liberal democracy.” Missing from the discussion are Beijing’s intellectual-property theft, threats against Taiwan, interference in Canadian elections, and its unjustified detention of two Canadian citizens.

 Her description of New York’s Zohran Mamdani as merely a “democratic socialist” similarly omits the controversies surrounding his views on Israel, which make him a deeply divisive figure.

 And in praising public resistance to immigration enforcement, she ignores the illegal immigration and border issues that lie at the heart of the American political divide. ICE’s excesses, and the public response, are a symptom of a wider, continental crisis. They aren’t the foundation of a political movement to rebalance America’s immigration needs and pressures.

 Freeland’s op-ed presents her as a seasoned guide to a changing world. But Canadians remember the record she left behind. No doubt she has seen much. But her record suggests she has more yet to learn than teach.