If you squint and use a little imagination, you can see the pile of brains sitting outside the cabinet room on Parliament Hill. That pile has been sitting there for nearly a decade, heavy with the organs of the men and women who hold some of the most powerful positions in Canada’s government. These ministers have been expected to remove them from their skulls before they enter the room, so the vacant space in their heads can be filled with nonsense directly from the Prime Minister’s Office.
Upon exiting the room, a brainless Finance Minister Bill Morneau, for example, would be required to deliver an enthusiastic defence of his government’s decision to reverse a planned increase to Old Age Security eligibility to 67 from 65, despite literally writing a book before he entered politics that discussed why reversing that was a bad idea. A brainless Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino would say that Conservatives are spreading “disinformation” by claiming an amendment to their gun-control legislation bans guns used for hunting, even though the amendment clearly did just that.
But no minister performed her post-lobotomy tasks so confidently, so adeptly, so loyally, as did Chrystia Freeland. She was recruited for her brains and reputation as a Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar with a storied career as a journalist and author. She won the by-election in Toronto Centre in 2013, generously donating her credibility to the third-place Liberal Party, which was newly led by a guy with a famous last name and seemingly not much else. Ms. Freeland brought the gravitas, the real-world experience and the smarts. And then, she encountered that pile outside the cabinet room, where she’d park her brain for the next nine years.
As Minister of International Trade, she dutifully pursued a trade deal with China – one that Canada hoped would entrench “progressive” elements, on issues such as feminism and climate change, in law – which arrogantly presumed that Canada could tame China in a way that membership to the World Trade Organization, for example, could not. As Finance Minister, she rolled out a series of measures ostensibly to improve housing affordability, but that in practise would only fuel demand and worsen supply-side issues. She oversaw record spending, sluggish growth and endless deficits. “Investments in our economic capacity are fiscally responsible,” Ms. Freeland said in 2023. The brain decaying outside the cabinet room knew better, but Ms. Freeland’s mouth never strayed from the PMO-approved script.
Mr. Trudeau’s deputy could reliably be called upon to defend the government amid any scandal. Ms. Freeland said she had 100 per cent confidence in Mr. Trudeau following the SNC-Lavalin scandal, in which the Prime Minister was accused by Attorney-General Jody Wilson-Raybould of trying to seek a preferential outcome for the company for political reasons. Ms. Freeland defended the government’s use of the Emergencies Act to deal with the Freedom convoy in 2022, and attempted to make the tenuous argument during the subsequent inquiry that an economic threat constituted a threat to national security as defined by the CSIS Act. And she toiled in the political muck, posting a torqued video of then-Conservative leader Erin O’Toole on Twitter during the 2021 election that implied he would privatize Canada’s health care system.
And yet for all of her loyalty, her subservience and her dedication, Ms. Freeland’s tenure in cabinet has been met with a rather humiliating and tragic end. The Finance Minister was reportedly not onside with the government’s harebrained plans for temporary GST relief and $250 bribe-cheques to Canadians and for this ultimate sin – disloyalty – she was told by Mr. Trudeau she could no longer serve as Finance Minister. After nearly a decade as a good soldier, Ms. Freeland learned a painful lesson: loyalty only matters to this Prime Minister if it is unyielding and unbroken.
Ahead of vacating her office, Ms. Freeland retrieved her brain and plopped it back into her skull as if to prove to Canadians that, indeed, it did exist all along. In a letter announcing her resignation, she noted that the risk posed by incoming President Donald Trump’s planned tariffs constitutes a serious threat, which demands an equally serious response. “That means eschewing costly political gimmicks, which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment,” she wrote. Ms. Freeland also got in a few other digs, remarking that Canadians “know when we are working for them, and they equally know when we are focused on ourselves,” and suggesting that the Prime Minister must work “in good faith and humility” with Canada’s premiers. The Freeland who betrayed the man she so faithfully supported is a Freeland Canadians might have hoped they could have seen all along. But this PMO would have never allowed it. The brains sit outside the cabinet room for a reason.