One of a Kind, All Right....Antagonizing the Tyrant

"The Toronto staff tried numerous times to engage her as it became more apparent she had no plans to include us. We were desperate for face time, for some acknowledgment that our jobs mattered and that the hard work we did was appreciated."
"It was infuriating to see her launch her political bid. Not once did she visit staff at the Toronto office, yet here she was now claiming that this was her home."
"Her lines on championing the middle class were beyond hypocritical. These were good-paying union jobs that were outsourced."
Unnamed former Toronto editor

"When you talk to her about rules of origin, or the dairy, or intellectual property or whatever -- some of these subjects that are extraordinarily complex -- she understood them, and could discuss them."
"Typically, politicians don't -- they are interested in the big picture."
"I never saw Chrystia react to any of that kind of criticism [from the Trump administration]. She's got a pretty thick skin."
David MacNaughton, Canadian ambassador to Washington

"Instead of backing away from the story -- because it was such a dangerous story to report on -- Chrystia blew it wide open. It took a tremendous amount of guts, because gangsters and oligarchs were involved in a lot of murders back then -- of journalists and others."
"Chrystia is like raw steel. It is kind of misleading, you know, you see this relatively short woman with a high-pitched voice, and you might think you can run roughshod over her. Well, guess what? You will have met your match and ten times over."
Bill Browder, founder, CEO, Hermitage Capital Management Ltd.

Chrystia Freeland with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Canadian trade negotiator Steve Verheul. PATRICK DOYLE/AFP/Getty Images

Chrystia Freeland's Ukrainian heritage speaks loud and clear through her scorn for Russia. It's not just the history between Russia and Ukraine and the horrors of the Holdomor, the USSR's rape of Ukraine, the breadbasket of the east, that left millions of Ukrainians to starve to death, and the current Russian Federation's violent intervention supporting secessionist ethnic Russian Ukrainians along with the piracy involved in requisitioning Crimea. She loathes Russia for many reasons. And along with that fact is the one that her grandfather was a fascist ally of Nazi Germany; righteous rage alongside unsavoury connections of anti-Semitism and Holocaust complicity.

But she is, of course, the darling of Canada's large Ukrainian community. The one that resisted the very notion that the Holocaust be commemorated in Canada by a dedicated memorial to the worst atrocity of state-authored genocidal annihilation the world has seen in still-living memory. A journalist by trade, with an outstanding academic record, a reportedly impeccable memory and a facility with a number of languages, she left journalism at the high echelons she had attained internationally, to run for public office. Sound familiar?

While it didn't work for Michael Ignatieff with his admirable journalistic background, his academic human rights teaching and leadership posts at Harvard and his dedication to human rights, it is working splendidly for Chrystia Freeland, that aspirational change of professions. Of course, Mr. Ignatieff aimed a little higher, attempting to win the vote for the Prime Ministership while Ms. Freeland responded to the Liberal Party's blandishments and sweetener of a cabinet position. Hers is the second-most-important position next to the PM's, however.

Mr. Ignatieff may have been scorned as the "just visiting" aspirant in view of his decades abroad, but on the other hand, he shares that with the globe-trotting Ms. Freeland. Both had influential contacts globally and within Canada, and the Liberal Party had high hopes in each instance when it succeeded in recruiting each in a desperate effort to regain the balance of power in Parliament, lost when Liberal arrogance and corruption at the time had finally succeeded in disgusting voters sufficiently to toss them out of power and bring in the Conservative alternative.

Mr. Browder was wowed by a journalist with a keen nose for an explosive expose that she would be credited for, giving his campaign to punish Russia by persuading liberal democracies, including Canada, to enact the Magnitsky Act in memory of his Russian lawyer who had uncovered state corruption and paid for his impudence with his life, while Mr. Browder, whose business was a victim of Russian state corruption -- in her high-profile reportage for the Financial Times as Moscow chief correspondent, furthering his plans for revenge. Chrystia Freeland made many influential connections throughout her career.

It is why the Toronto editor prefers to have his name withheld from his criticism of her casual betrayal of Canadian journalists whom she had hired for a large news venture as head of Thomson Reuters's digital news platform, Reuters Next. She had signed up well known journalists with rich contracts in Toronto with a view to adding them to the staff for this new project. She had become an employer powerhouse, in the process of promoting Reuters, burnishing her own personal brand in the process. She remains so well connected that the Toronto editor fears employment repercussions.

And then, suddenly, even while the Toronto employees wanted more information on their contracts and to learn more about their proposed function, Freeland simply closed down the Toronto operation affecting the employment of 25 people, favouring the jobs moving to Bangalore, India. This woman's conscience doesn't appear to have suffered, at the very time when, having joined the Liberal Club of Entitlement, she was already secure in her entitlements. So much so that nothing seems to faze her, not even negotiating though tumultuous and taut meetings to achieve a new NAFTA.

So secure in herself, in fact, that she never thought twice of cautionary diplomacy when she set out to deliberately and publicly join forces with those Americans who went out of their way to deplore and criticize the President of the United States of America. And while it's perfectly in line for American citizens to do that, when the Foreign Minister of a trading partner, a continental neighbour and political/social ally goes out of her way to attract the thin-skinned attention of a Donald Trump, heads swerve and those in power react, as did Mr. President when he stated baldly his dislike of her, setting another precedent after her own.

Named Diplomat of the Year (really!) by Foreign Policy magazine, her Washington speech was replete with warning about the rich getting richer, the middle class abandoned and people becoming "vulnerable to the demagogue who scapegoats the outsider, the other -- whether an immigrant at home or a foreign actor", pretty rich stuff from a woman whose Toronto home is pricey real estate over a million, who hauls in a hefty salary and can anticipate a golden handshake in retirement. As for the tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum for national security: "absurd", a "naked example of the U.S. putting its thumb on the scale in violation of the very rules it helped to write".

Undiplomatically true, but not for a Minister of Foreign Affairs to triumph over Trump with, but a journalist of which she is no longer part of that profession. Followed by her panel appearance on Taking on the Tyrant, with its video comparing Trump to Vladimir Putin, and Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian mass slaughterer. Eliciting from the volatile Trump the inevitable: "We are very unhappy with the negotiations and the negotiating style of Canada. We don't like their representative very much". He has lots of company there.

Arrogance? Between Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland it's a tossup.

At the United Nations in September, Donald Trump told reporters that the U.S. side didn’t care much for Canada’s chief negotiator Chrystia Freeland. NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images