OTTAWA – When former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland enters her campaign rallies in her bid to become the next Liberal leader, speakers always blare Nelly Furtado’s 2006 hit “Maneater.”
It is a nod to the central theme of her pitch to the country: she will not shy away from taking on powerful men.
With just one week left before the race concludes, that message is front and centre as she declares that her political experience makes her “uniquely qualified” for the challenges facing Canada today.
Those challenges have increased since she launched her leadership bid in mid-January, and she now calls the battle ahead the “greatest threat since the Second World War.”
With polls and fundraising pointing to former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney as the front-runner, Freeland still sees a possible path to victory in a race that, much like global politics as a whole, has been dominated by the disruptive decisions of U.S. President Donald Trump.
“I know President Trump. I fought for Canada in the first Trump administration, and I got a good deal for Canada,” Freeland said in an interview with The Canadian Press from Edmonton where she was holding a rally on Saturday night.
“I’ve been trade minister, and I’ve been foreign minister and finance minister. And I understand the severity of the challenge we face today.”
Freeland was the foreign affairs minister for the first three years of Trump’s last term in the White House, and led Canada’s team negotiating the updated Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade agreement.
This time Trump has raised the stakes, threatening economy-wide tariffs on all Canadian imports and repeatedly insisting Canada would be better off it allowed itself to be annexed by the United States.
Trump also appears ready to break old alliances with friendly gestures to Russia, while that country — along with China — increases their posture in the Arctic.
Trump is not shy about sharing his dislike for Freeland. During the first trade talks in 2018 he complained about her bargaining style and said “we don’t like their representative very much.”
In December, after Freeland resigned from cabinet, he called her “toxic” and just last week, in an interview with British magazine The Spectator, Trump called her “whack.”
“She’s absolutely terrible for the country. She’s incompetent in many respects and can only cause ill will for Canada,” Trump said in the interview. “[Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau understood that. And he actually fired her because of a meeting he had with me.”
Freeland wears the insults like a badge of honour.
“There’s a reason Trump called me a ‘whack,’” she said on X Friday. “There’s a reason he complained about my negotiating skills. There’s a reason Putin kicked me out of Russia, too. I don’t back down — and Trump and Putin know it.”
Freeland famously resigned from cabinet on Dec. 16, shocking even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when she stepped aside just hours before she was to deliver the government’s fall economic statement.
The move — coming three days after Trudeau had told her he was going to replace her as finance minister with Carney, who is not an elected MP — threw the Liberals into crisis.
It set the wheels in motion for Trudeau to announce his upcoming resignation in early January, and invigorated Freeland’s profile within the party. Until then she was heavily seen as a Trudeau loyalist.
She is now desperately trying to distance herself from his policies, almost all of which she marketed heavily to Canadians as being in their best interest.
In her resignation letter to Trudeau, for example, she insisted she had not supported the GST holiday or $250 cheques promised in the fall in a bid to win loyalty back from cash-crunched Canadians.
The political landscape has shifted considerably since this leadership race began. A once grand Conservative lead in the polls has evaporated, and Pierre Poilievre’s party is now neck-and-neck with the Liberals.
Most pollsters and pundits assign credit to that shift to both the departure of Trudeau — who was wearing Canadians’ anger over the affordability crisis and housing shortage — as well as a rising national pride in the face of Trump’s threats.
For all the Liberal candidates, distinguishing themselves from Trudeau is key, but for Freeland perhaps the stiffest challenge.
She would not directly answer whether or not she’s spoken to Trudeau since her resignation but did say she has felt free to be her true self since she left Trudeau’s inner circle.
“This leadership campaign has been really fun. It has been a personal liberation for me. It is allowing me to fully be my own person, and to speak out, and to outline the policies that I would pursue as leader,” she said.
Many of these policies centre on issues like building stronger relations with Europe and accelerating the timeline for Canada to hit its NATO defence spending commitment of two per cent of GDP by 2027, five years sooner than currently planned.
Trump’s verbal confrontation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over building security guarantees into a possible Russian peace deal underscores the need for Canada to enhance ties with Europe, Freeland said.
While the Liberal leadership still needs to be decided, Freeland said she was in touch with European leaders in the immediate aftermath of Trump and Zelenskyy’s ill-fated meeting.
“I’ve been in touch with the Prime Minister of Ukraine (Denys Shmyhal), and have told have let him know that he and Ukraine have my support. I’ve also had a number of European leaders ministers be in touch with me, with real anxiety and wanting to be clear that Europe continues to support Ukraine, that they see Canada as an important ally and partner,” she said.
Trudeau is attending a European defence summit in London Sunday, which is focused on shoring up continental support for Ukraine.
For Canada’s own defences, Freeland said she is focused on increasing Canada’s military resources in the Arctic, plus the use of drones and artificial intelligence.
“We are seeing the value of those technologies in the war in Ukraine, and Canada is good at that, and we have to support our own industries and our own defence by investing in them,” she said.
To enact this vision, Freeland still needs to win the Liberal leadership and likely a federal election that could quickly follow.
Voting is currently underway in the Liberal leadership, and ahead of the convention Freeland said she plans to try and speak with as many of these voters as possible.
“I’m going to spend the next week, working my heart out, talking to as many liberals as I can, working with my supporters, and making the case to them that at this critical moment for Canada, I am uniquely qualified by virtue of my experience, by virtue of my ideas, by virtue of my guts, to be the leader of the Liberal Party, the next prime minister of our country,” Freeland said.
Former Government House leader Karina Gould and former Montreal MP Frank Baylis are also running.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Mar. 2, 2025.
