Say this for Chrystia Freeland, she was early in anticipating the middle-class discontent that is widespread in the world’s advanced economies.
She saw the threat it poses to the social stability of Western liberal democracies, including Canada and the U.S.
“Authoritarianism is on the march, and it is time for liberal democracy to fight back,” Freeland told a Washington, D.C., audience in 2018 on being named “Foreign Policy” magazine’s diplomat of the year.
Since then, Western democracies have been ineffectual in defending Ukraine after it was attacked by Russia in 2022. Police-state China’s global influence has only grown. And in November, an autocratic Donald Trump was returned to the White House.
In this anxious moment for Canada, we are living the troubled future Freeland first anticipated years ago. Trump’s planned tariffs could cost Canada hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Today, populist leaders with simplistic remedies are using demagoguery to obtain power across Europe and in the White House.
Freeland is running against former central banker Mark Carney in the race to succeed Justin Trudeau as leader of the federal Liberal party, in a vote taking place March 9.
Carney is the fresh face in a federal election this year, drawing attention away from veteran parliamentarians Freeland and Tory leader Pierre Poilievre.
The object here is not to endorse a candidate, but to suggest an equal consideration of the choices to lead Canada at this time of crisis.
After 211 years of peace between the U.S. and Canada, pre- and-post Confederation, we are now under attack from our southern neighbour.
We need to know from Freeland’s prescient assessments of changing world conditions what she would bring to the fight for Canada’s continued sovereignty and prosperity against an annexationist U.S.
For Freeland, a re-elected U.S. President Donald Trump is a natural outcome of forces that have been building for years.
Back in 2018, Freeland warned of both domestic and external threats to values shared by Canada and its allies among liberal democracies.
“Within the club of wealthy, Western democracies, we’re seeing homegrown anti-democratic movements on the rise,” Freeland said then.
“Whether comprising neo-Nazis, white supremacists, ‘incels’, nativists or radical anti-globalists, such movements seek to undermine democracy from within.”
Seven years ago, Freeland foresaw a more virulent American MAGA movement, the rise of antisemitism here and abroad, and a fascist AfD party gaining popularity in Germany.
“Angry populism thrives where the middle class is hollowed out,” Freedland said in her 2018 address.
And “middle-class working families aren’t wrong to feel left behind. Median wages have been stagnating; jobs are becoming more precarious; pensions uncertain; housing, child care and education harder to afford.”
Freeland also sensed a greater American use of tariffs in violation of a postwar international order designed to suppress protectionism.
Freeland told her U.S. audience in 2018 that “(Canadians) understand that many Americans today are no longer certain that the rules-based international order — of which you were the principal architect and for which you wrote the biggest cheques — still benefits America.”
The current threatened U.S. breach of that order is a cornerstone of Trumpism redux.
In a 2022 speech at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, Freeland identified a further decline in liberal democracy as countries like China “have grown both wealthier and more coercive.
“And as Putin is murderously proving,” with Russia’s attack on Ukraine earlier that year, “economic interdependence does not always prevent war.”
Freeland’s prescription included a new coalition of countries with shared democratic and social-justice values. Or, as Freeland put it in 2022, “a world where democracies depend on democracies rather than despots.”
Partners in such a coalition would reinforce each other with “friendshoring.” Coalition members would favour each other in government procurement and investment flows.
Until Trump was re-elected on Nov. 5, the U.S. might have been part of that new coalition. Today, it is among the countries from which a coalition would seek to protect itself.
In the dystopia Trump is creating, America’s trade and mutual defence treaties like NATO “do not matter, and America can ride roughshod over its friends — or anyone,” Freeland wrote recently in Britain’s “Economist.”
Carney might be a convert to friendshoring, at least in military procurement.
In pledging to increase Canada’s defence budget, Carney said last week that he would buy new military equipment from non-U.S. sources as much as possible.
Canada’s friends have yet join us in the fight to preserve genuine free trade against Trump’s winner-take-all predations.
The deafening silence of our liberal democratic allies, from Britain and France to Japan and Australia, troubles Canadians more every day it endures.
“Stand with us,” Freeland has urged our allies.
After all, they will be next to be targeted by Trump.
“Not only is it the right thing to do,” Freeland says, “it will save you a lot of pain and economic harm later.”
