Freeland’s book reveals Chrétien’s power play, crying in cabinet and Trudeau’s lecture about using the word ‘crazy’

OTTAWA — Nearly two years after her shocking resignation from cabinet that shook the halls of power in Ottawa, Chrystia Freeland is telling her side of the story of how she was about to get dumped by Justin Trudeau as finance minister.

Her new book “Unreliable Boyfriend” is in part a political memoir and in part a reflection of Donald Trump’s America. But it also contains so-far undisclosed details of why she chose to resign from Trudeau’s cabinet the day she was supposed to present the fall economic statement — thus precipitating Trudeau’s own departure weeks later.

Freeland writes that while she thinks history will be kind to Trudeau because he stood up to Trump and implemented social programs such as childcare, she thinks she probably left Trudeau’s cabinet “a year, or maybe two years, too late.”

Here are a few revelations from Freeland’s new book.

Freeland said while many were encouraging her to leave cabinet in her final six months in Trudeau’s cabinet, the pivotal moment was when she was drinking chardonnay with former prime minister Jean Chrétien at his Ottawa home in November 2024.

Chrétien, she writes, started the conservation with a “healthy dose of flattery” — calling her a “very good finance minister” and said she had been “unfailingly loyal” to Trudeau which was “admirable.”

But the tone of the conversation took a turn when Chrétien said Freeland had a responsibility not only to Trudeau, but to the Liberal party and to Canada.

“As long as you support him, he will stay on as PM. And he will lose the next election,” she recalls the former prime minister saying.

He added that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would become prime minister, the Liberal Party would be devastated, and she would be partly to blame for that.

“After the gentle caress of Mr. Chrétien’s earlier compliments, those words felt like a slap in the face, or, since we’re Canadian and winter was coming, like stepping out from a warm house into forty-below weather,” she wrote.

Freeland said she did not go back to her hotel room that evening planning to step down from Trudeau’s cabinet, but she did go to bed with “a new and horrible understanding” that she would be partly at fault if Trudeau led the Liberals into the next election.

Despite having served as one of Trudeau’s top ministers for nearly a decade, Freeland said she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she met with the prime minister alone. That was about to change in the days prior to her departure.

At the end of a meeting in his office on Dec. 2, 2024, she said that Trudeau called her aside for “a few rare private minutes” to tell her he wanted her to continue serving as his finance minister until the next election, which would happen in less than a year.

Six days later, on Dec. 8, 2024, Trudeau invited her to his home at Rideau Cottage.

“It was probably the longest time I have spent alone with him,” she wrote.

Freeland said they drank glasses of water and Trudeau mused about his determination to lead the Liberals into the next election. He then made a surprising statement.

“At one point, apropos of nothing, he told me he believed that one day I would become prime minister, and that I would do a good job,” she wrote.

Later that week, Trudeau and his team removed $12 billion in spending cuts she had pushed for in the fall economic statement. The Globe and Mail also reported that Trudeau was again trying to convince Mark Carney to replace her as finance minister.

On Dec. 13, 2024, Trudeau and Freeland had their infamous one-on-one Zoom call.

Trudeau said she would be shuffled out of the finance portfolio the day after presenting the fall economic statement. When she asked who would replace her, Trudeau said with a “half-proud, half-defiant smile” that it would be Carney.

“The Zoom call with Trudeau had taught me that I simply couldn’t trust the PM — and that he had decided not to trust me. I had to leave.”

Trudeau took a lot of heat for correcting a woman who used the word “mankind” instead of “peoplekind” in a town hall meeting in 2018 — but it turns out cabinet ministers also had to mind their language in private, according to Freeland.

In one cabinet meeting, Trudeau apparently took issue with “a very progressive female colleague” casually referring to something as “crazy.”

“That earned her a long, harsh public scolding from Trudeau, who informed her that using ‘crazy’ as a derogatory adjective was insulting to people with mental health issues,” wrote Freeland.

Trudeau suggested they instead use the word “bananas” which was less offensive.

Freeland said that while she has always bristled at accusations of “wokeness” and “political correctness,” she said that “linguistic-purity tests” can also be off-putting to regular people who struggle with which words are okay or not to use.

“And they can give people the sense — and rightly so — that their leaders are more focused on the performance of virtue than on actually improving people’s lives.”

“Crying was routine at cabinet meetings. There were always boxes of Kleenex on hand, and really sad colleagues would sometimes get a hug from the PM,” Freeland wrote.

Yet what troubled her the most about the crying and the lectures “was that it sometimes went along with what seemed like bullying,” she added.

Freeland did not go into detail about the alleged bullying but said one of Trudeau’s “favourite homilies” to cabinet and caucus was talking about the necessity of eating “shit sandwiches” from time to time.

He would also instruct his ministers to stay on message until they “wanted to vomit a little bit in our mouth.”

“By the time he stepped down, PM Trudeau had been so thoroughly caricatured as a woke poser that it was easy to forget that one of the things that had captivated Canadians when he first burst onto the scene was his macho charisma,” she wrote.

Freeland referred to one of his early breakthrough moments as the charity boxing match against Senator Patrick Brazeau, a member of the Algonquin Nation.

In a controversial interview with the Rolling Stone, Trudeau boasted about his wager with Brazeau that the loser of the fight would be required to have his hair cut in the lobby of the House of Commons.

Brazeau apparently resisted as long hair carries deep spiritual significance in many First Nations cultures. Trudeau said that is why he proposed that bet. “When a warrior cuts his hair, it’s a sign of shame, so it’s very apropos,” he told the magazine.

National Post
calevesque@postmedia.com

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