I was no fan of Chystia Freeland but like Mitch Heimpel, I have to admire how artistically she sliced off the Prime Minister’s balls on her way out of cabinet:
Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking in 2022.
One thing that is obvious from the former finance minister’s now infamous Monday morning letter is that she internalized the lessons of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott and Bill Morneau. If you do not immediately put out your version of your demotion or dismissal, it will be done through anonymous leaks to the Parliament Hill Toronto Star or CBC bureau. Ottawa will wonder what really happened. There will be murmurs and whispers about whether you were ever much of a “team player.”
[…]
She left no doubt about what happened, how it happened, or how she feels about it.
In doing so, she did something remarkable. She made it impossible for the PMO’s spinners and issues managers to put the prime minister out to address the media after her letter. He couldn’t answer for anything in the letter without having to answer for everything in the letter. Trudeau may be the most impressive communicator the Liberal party has produced since his father. And he was of no use to the PMO to try and counter Freeland’s narrative on Monday. He could only make matters worse. His one public appearance was in front of a big money Liberal fundraising event, with a pool camera. A bit like an Eastern-bloc gymnast performing before the East German judge.
Even when TIME magazine had him in full blackface, he still addressed the press from the plane. But not Monday.
Never in his almost 10 years as prime minister has Justin Trudeau had a day like that. Supposedly, nominally, the Liberal’s party’s best campaign and communications asset was rendered functionally useless to a television audience. To mix sports metaphors, she beat him in the paint. She drove the lane on him, and he could do nothing. And he did nothing. As of this writing, the prime minister has still not addressed either the media or the country, and is, in fact, cancelling previously scheduled interviews.
And then, Freeland went to the caucus meeting. Anything he wanted to say there, he had to say it to a crowd that could get her version by simply looking over to gauge her reaction. She sank a three pointer on him at the end of the day, just to prove she could.
We can debate her record as finance minister later. Lord knows I have my own qualms with it. But this isn’t about that. Everything else on Monday, the $62-billion deficit and the tanking loonie, are about that.
But her resignation was something unexpected. She bested Justin Trudeau in an air war. She didn’t just beat him, she ran him over. She silenced him.
She may have ended him. That much we still don’t know yet. But she ensured she won’t be remembered for either Disney+ or the “vibecession.”
The first line of her political history is now Chrystia’s Version. And we’ll remember it all too well.
