Chrystia Freeland Quits Trudeau's Cabinet

OTTAWA — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has lost his top minister.

Chrystia Freeland, the deputy prime minister and finance minister, resigned hours before she was due to deliver a major speech about the country's finances — and to share the Liberal government's fiscal plan heading into a high-stakes election year.

Freeland dropped the bombshell news in a letter to Trudeau in which she revealed apparent discord with the prime minister stretching back through the fall.

"For the past number of weeks, you and I have found ourselves at odds about the best path forward for Canada," Freeland wrote to Trudeau.

Nobody else in Trudeau's Cabinet matched the international profile of Freeland, who cultivated a global rolodex of business and political leaders over 30 years in journalism.

Trudeau recruited Freeland in 2013. She eventually served as international trade minister and foreign minister before taking on the finance role in 2020. She was a major player in Canada's renegotiation of NAFTA during the first Trump administration.

More recently, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Freeland — who has Ukrainian-Canadian heritage — became a leading global advocate for Kyiv.

According to Freeland's letter, Trudeau intended to shuffle her into a different portfolio. She interpreted that offer as a loss of confidence.

"Upon reflection, I have concluded that the only honest and viable path is for me to resign from the Cabinet," she wrote.

The stunning development on Parliament Hill only makes Trudeau's hold on power more untenable. His housing minister, Sean Fraser, announced Monday he wouldn't seek another term — a loss of a top communicator on the PM's front bench.

Freeland, once seen as Trudeau's heir apparent, made clear that she is not resigning her seat in Parliament — and she intends to seek another term.

In her letter, Freeland argued stridently for fiscal discipline in the face of President-elect Donald Trump's threat of 25 percent tariffs on Canadian imports.

"We need to take the threat extremely seriously. That means keeping our fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war."

Freeland then took a shot at the government's temporary scrapping of the federal sales tax on groceries, toys, diapers and some alcohol until February — a "holiday" meant to alleviate the cost of living. The Parliamentary Budget Officer pegged the cost of the measure at a minimum of C$1.5 billion.

Fiscal discipline "means eschewing costly political gimmicks," she wrote, "which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment."

Later, Freeland also called on Ottawa to work "in good faith and humility" with Canada's premiers on a "true Team Canada response" to Trump's threats

Trudeau's party has trailed rival Conservatives by double digits in polls, and he is personally deeply unpopular with voters. The progressive New Democratic Party abandoned a governing deal in September, leaving the Liberals with no reliable allies in Parliament.

Trudeau has long insisted he'll stay on to fight the next election, but Freeland's resignation will only add fuel to speculation that the prime minister's time is up.

Canadians, Freeland wrote, see right through infighting: "They know when we are working for them, and they equally know when we are focused on ourselves."