Title: Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill
Author: Catherine Tsalikis
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publisher: House of Anansi
Pages: 360
“Some things just would not happen without Chrystia Freeland.”
So states Catherine Tsalikis, a Toronto-based writer and journalist, in her sympathetic-and-then-some biography of Canada’s former finance minister and former deputy prime minister.
There is hardly a word of criticism in the pages of the book, even though Freeland’s career has been marked by controversy as well as accomplishment. The author refers to her subject throughout the book as “Chrystia,” rather than “Freeland,” an approach usually taken only by the very friendliest of biographers. That is the case here.
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The author believes Freeland would be Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “most obvious successor,” because she “has accomplished so much and is, by all indications, not ready to stop.” This book, one suspects, is intended to help realize that future. The author could not have known – no one could have – that such a future would be put very much in doubt by Freeland’s decision earlier this week to resign from cabinet.
That said, Tsalikis is an engaging writer who was given generous access to Freeland’s family, friends and colleagues. And Freeland’s life story is extraordinary.
Read an excerpt from Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill
She grew up in Peace River, Alta., the daughter of a strong-willed father – a lawyer who hated paying parking tickets or seeing the French language on signs – and a strong-willed mother, also a lawyer, who fought for the rights of women and to protect her Ukrainian heritage, two themes that would intertwine in her daughter’s life.
Her parents separated when Freeland was 8; she and her younger sister then shuttled back and forth between Peace River and Edmonton. (I wish Tsalikis had delved into the impact of that separation on Freeland.)
She was a brilliant student and attended Harvard University, where she declared she would never be foreign minister of Canada because the country was too small. She had already begun seeking out and cultivating influential people, such as economics professor Larry Summers who would become president Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary.
After graduating, Freeland went to Ukraine as an exchange student, where her activities in support of the pro-democracy movement earned her a 2,000-word rebuke in Pravda Ukrainy for her “abuse of hospitality.”
Putting off a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford to work as a stringer for the Financial Times, her biggest scoop was being in a Kyiv hotel room with a prominent dissident and his supporters when police smashed through the door firing tear gas and dragged the dissident away. Locked in the room, with a wet handkerchief over her face to fight the fumes, Freeland scribbled notes and dropped them to the pavement below, where a fellow correspondent faxed them to FT.
Such anecdotes are a great strength of the book, and there are many of them.
In an astonishingly short space of time, Freeland was FT’s Moscow bureau chief, then British editor, then deputy editor of The Globe and Mail at 31. The year was 1999, and The Globe was gearing up for a fight against the upstart National Post. Freeland was part of a team brought in by the Thomson family, owners of The Globe and Mail, to win that fight.
In the newsroom, there was grumbling about her disruptive management style. Cathrin Bradbury, then a managing editor, remembered Freeland’s frenetic, almost chaotic, physical energy. But, she added, “it was tempered by this intellectual precision. So just as you might have thought, ‘There’s chaos here,’ you’d be drawn in by her intellect, and there was nothing chaotic about that.”
Within two years she was back at the Financial Times, where she ended up on the losing side of a newsroom power struggle and was exiled to the New York bureau.
Though it allowed her to compile “a Rolodex beyond the dreams of avarice,” as one observer put it, her journalism career was on a downward slope when she showed up at a launch party in Toronto in 2012 for her book, Plutocrats, which put her in the same room with Justin Trudeau, who was running for the leadership of the moribund Liberal Party.
Deeply impressed, he urged her to consider running for office as a Liberal. Though it took some convincing, she eventually agreed to run in a by-election. By 2015, Trudeau was Prime Minister and Freeland was his minister for international trade.
Her first big achievement was to rescue the troubled free-trade negotiations with the European Union by walking away from the table when the Walloon region of Belgium threatened to scuttle the agreement. The gambit surprised Trudeau and his advisers, but it worked. The Walloons relented.
When U.S. president Donald Trump demanded changes to the North American free-trade agreement, Freeland, as foreign minister, advised Trudeau not to rush into a deal. This may have been a mistake (my opinion, not the author’s), for the U.S and Mexico reached a bilateral accord, forcing Canada to scramble to get onside.
Also as foreign minister, she championed Magnitsky legislation, which imposed sanctions of Russian officials who were human-rights abusers, and spearheaded efforts to rescue gays at risk in Chechnya and aid workers in Syria.
But a tweet condemning human-rights abuses in Saudi Arabia blindsided the Prime Minister’s Office and enraged the Saudis, who cut off virtually all official ties.
In 2020, after Bill Morneau stepped down as finance minister in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Freeland, now deputy prime minister, took his place. Tsalikis paints a flattering portrait of that tenure, focusing on Freeland’s leadership in creating the national child-care program, while playing down the impact of rising inflation, rising interest rates, lacklustre productivity and chronic deficits.
And what comes next? “Few would be surprised if she were to become the next leader of the Liberal Party – or a prime minister of Canada,” Tsalikis speculates. With the government more than 20 points behind in the polls, that was less than likely even before Monday’s spectacular blowup.
Catherine Tsalikis has given us a life of Chrystia Freeland (up until this week) that anyone who admires the most powerful woman in Canadian politics will enjoy. Others may enjoy the book as well, though they might wish to read it holding a saltshaker.
