Trump, Freeland and the Freefall of Trudeau

In one fell swoop, Donald Trump has turned Canadian politics upside down.

The Trudeau cabinet is coming apart at the seams, with the shocking departure of Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland.

And on the same day, popular Housing Minister Sean Fraser announced that he will not seek re-election. These high-profile departures, each for different reasons, raise real questions about whether the PM himself can continue in office. The jury is very much out on that.

Meanwhile, Trump’s threats have dominated today’s premiers’ meeting of the Council of the Federation, chaired by Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

The provincial leaders are trying desperately to come up with a united strategy to fight what could be economic Armageddon in this country triggered by Trump’s tariffs.

They were counting on big federal spending on tightening the Canada-U.S. border, one of Trump’s key demands to avoid a tariff war. Ottawa is reportedly ready to offer as much as a billion dollars in new spending.

No one knows if that will be enough to mollify Trump. Though “concerned” about Freeland’s sudden departure, a unified front to fight Trump’s threats dominated the premiers’ gathering.

How did the political universe in Canada change at warp speed?

Captain Chaos. It was all set in motion when Trump vowed to slap a 25-per-cent tariff on all goods coming into the U.S. from this country and Mexico.

That created an existential dilemma for Canada. How to respond if the Felon-in-Chief made good on his threat after his inauguration on Jan. 20? Nothing short of the viability of Canada’s economy was on the table.

To counter that threat, Trudeau put in motion a major, if dubious, cabinet shuffle. The plan was to have his new team and a game plan in place before Donald Trump takes office.

Part of that change was moving Freeland out of finance to become a minister without a portfolio responsible for Canada-U.S. relations. It has been widely reported that Trudeau has been in serious talks to have former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney join cabinet as finance minister.

To grasp the enormity of what has happened here, it should be remembered that Freeland was not just any minister. For almost all of the Trudeau years, she has been the political superstar of his cabinet, always at his side and on his side.

During the first Trump administration, she was put in charge of Canada-U.S. relations and led the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. That bolstered Trudeau’s claim to being a feminist. She also was the first female minister of finance in Canadian history, and one of Trudeau’s most trusted confidantes.

But when Freeland got the word last Friday that the PM wanted to move her out of finance, she was apparently taken aback by the obvious demotion.

Instead of agreeing to a new assignment, Freeland decided that the only “honest” course was to resign. And she did so on the very day she was supposed to read the government’s long-awaited fall economic update in the House of Commons. It was, as one television commentator put it, “a nuclear bomb.” Interestingly, she plans to remain as an MP and run in the next election.

It was like Jody Wilson-Raybould all over again — another high-profile woman who felt betrayed by the PM.

Freeland’s offered reason for resigning? She needed the PM’s support and claimed that his decision to remove her from finance “made clear that I no longer enjoy that confidence and possess the authority that comes with that.”

And that wasn’t all. In a revealing and highly damaging letter posted on X, Freeland confirmed that she and the PM did not see eye-to-eye on fiscal and monetary issues.

In fact, as was first reported by the Globe and Mail, the PM and his finance minister had been “at odds about the path forward for Canada” for weeks.

Freeland’s words on the way out the door made clear that Trudeau’s once most powerful minister did not have confidence in the PM.

The PM wanted to increase spending, even if it meant that the government broke its commitment to keep the projected deficit to $40 billion. And he wanted a finance minister who could persuasively make the case with Canadians that the deficits were worth it. On that front, Freeland fell short in Trudeau’s eyes.

For her part, Freeland wanted more fiscal restraint so that the country could better deal with Trump if he actually thrusted the two countries into a costly tariff war.

She saw Trump’s proposed tariffs as a “grave threat” to Canada. To the then-finance minister, that meant keeping our fiscal powder dry “so that we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war.”

What Freeland didn’t want was what she called “costly political gimmicks” driving up the deficit. That was a not-so-subtle reference to the government’s two-month GST holiday, not to mention those $250 cheques to working Canadians making less than $150,000 a year.

Freeland lost the argument, and now Dominic LeBlanc, Trudeau’s close childhood friend, is the new finance minister.

But the big winner with today’s extraordinary turn of events was Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. Presented with a startling opening by Freeland’s critique of the PM, he pounced like a cat.

Poilievre reminded Canadians that 24 Liberal MP dissidents had already lost confidence in Trudeau — and now add to that list his finance minister. Trudeau had lost control of everything, from crime, immigration, inflation, the deficit and even his own caucus, causing “the worst chaos in the Government of Canada.”

Poilievre also took the opportunity to skewer NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh for his ongoing support of the minority Liberal government. He invited Singh to put Canada first instead of his pension. It was time, he said, for the NDP to bring down a government that had totally lost the confidence of the country.

Singh appeared to be listening. Today in question period, he asked the PM to resign immediately, claiming Trudeau was focused on in-fighting within his own party rather than the tough times Canadians are facing.

Without the NDP’s support, this government is toast.

The most prophetic words in Freeland’s bitter goodbye to cabinet were these: “Inevitably, our time in government will come to an end.”

After this day’s momentous events, that time will be sooner rather than later.

Some say that the incoming president, who has just been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, is just too powerful to provoke. I would remind readers that the same magazine made Adolf Hitler Man of the Year in 1938.

Back then, a lot of people thought Hitler too could be appeased. That world leaders could go along to get along with Germany’s demagogue. Everyone knows where that led.