Backstory: Chrystia Freeland's Last Stand
The numbers don't make sense, but that's not all that doesn't add up about Freeland's humiliation and Mark Carney's succession to the Liberal throne.
This is a very deep background edition of The Real Story. You’ll want to put your feet up. Maybe pour yourself a drink.
Riddle me this, then.
To get the weirdness about the Liberal leadership vote up front and out of the way, here we have the Liberal Party boasting, on January 25, that nearly 400,000 “Registered Liberals” had already signed up to vote in the leadership race. This was just two days before the January 27 cutoff date for new registered voters.
By Sunday night, roughly 250,000 voters appear to have simply vanished.
As recently as last Friday afternoon, Liberal Party national campaign co-chair Terry Tuguid was telling CBC News that yes, things were weird, but everything was under control. “As you know, we’ve had to take certain precautions because of foreign interference.”
I’ll say.
As testimony before the Hogue Commission heard last year, our sort-of-still Prime Minister Justin Trudeau saw nothing wrong with party rules that allowed 14-year-old Chinese foreign students to be recruited, signed up for free and mobilized to vote in Liberal party leadership and candidate-selection contests.
That’s how Beijing’s Toronto consulate managed to ace the Don Valley North Liberal candidacy for the dodgy United Front favorite Han Dong in the lead-up to the severely Beijing-monkeywrenched 2019 federal election.
CSIS told Trudeau about this at the time, just days before the 2019 vote, but he said nothing about it and he did nothing about it, and if you saw something wrong wih the disclosures that first began to appeared in the press in 2013, the Trudeau government called you a racist. This was a gutless evasion that certain of our colleagues in the news media were only too eager to condone.
Owing to intelligence agency whistleblowing, public revulsion and the findings of the Hogue Commission, the party changed its rules on January 10, only four days after Trudeau’s January 6 announcement that he was resigning. At the time, the Liberals were polling at 16 percent, and even Trudeau’s caucus wanted him gone.
The new rules stipulated that 14-year-olds could still vote, but voters had to be citizens or permanent residents with a willingness and an easy ability to confirm their identities. Fast-foward to Sunday’s Liberal Party jubilee at that convention centre in Ottawa:
The party voting system assigns 100 “points” to each of the 338 federal ridings across Canada and Carney secured 29,456.91 points, with Chrystia Freeland in a distant second place at 2,728.578 points, Karina Gould with 1,100.343 and Frank Baylis at 1,014.183.
Carney’s victory: a whopping 85.9 percent. Freeland came in with a mere eight percent.
On Sunday, the Liberal vote counters declared that only 163,836 electors had been registered and cleared as eligible to vote, and 151,899 electors cast ballots. So if there were 164,000-ish electors, where did the other 240,000-ish potential voters go?
Were they non-citizen holdovers from Trudeau’s base in the Mandarin bloc? Were they regular Liberal Party enthusiasts rendered ineligible by the new and complex identity verification process? Did they get ballots with no names on them, as some complained? Did they just not bother to vote?
The most amusing partial explanation comes from oddball Liberal MP and leadership hopeful Rubdy Dhalla, who was disqualified last month owing to “irregularities” in the financing of her campaign. She claims to have signed up 100,000 supporters before she got turfed from the race.
The Liberal Party isn’t exactly falling all over itself to explain what happened.
The Dauphin is dead. Long live the Dauphin.
I’m not suggesting any legerdemain or clandestine maneuvering went on here. It’s just that the entire Liberal Party establishment had thrown itself into the work of grinding Freeland’s candidacy into the dust, so certain questions do arise. You’ll find some answers in this newsletter.
The result: At what is possibly the most inopportune moment in Canada’s history, we’re about to find ourselves with a prime minister who is a monochromatic, unelected high-finance technocrat and Liberal Party deep-insider. There’s nothing particularly untoward about that, even. Carleton University’s Philippe Lagassé, an authority in parliamentary convention, will explain why.
It’s just that Canada’s sovereignty and national security are under attack from a madman occupying the White House who seems to see Canada the way his friend Vladimir Putin sees Ukraine - as an invalid, illegitimate country, just another Greenland that can be bought, subdued or bullied by “economic force” to become the 51st American state.
It can’t be said that all we’ve heard from Carney is a steady stream of soft-nationalist platitudes and assurances that he knows how the big world works because he’s been around - Goldman Sachs, Bank of England governor, Bank of Canada governor, big boss at Brookfield Asset Management - and he was a goalie with a scrappy hockey team back in the day. But it’s close.
Apart from “Trust me, I’m a banker,” Carney tends to sometimes echo Conservative leader Pierre Polievre, and sometimes Chrystia Freeland, and sometimes even borrowing from former Conservative leader Stephen Harper’s rallying cry from more than a decade ago about remaking Canada as an “energy superpower.”
Carney doesn’t exactly come across as the fire-in-the-belly leader Canada could use right about now. His end game: to make Americans “show us respect and make credible, reliable commitments to free and fair trade”. I hear neither bagpipes no bugles.
Trump’s tariffs are partly primitve psychological warfare and partly a strategy of skull-and-bones economic sabotage that’s tanking the stock market. Trump has been increasingly explicit that he intends to unravel Canada’s highly integrated cross-border supply chains and to crater our foreign trade receipts - 70 per cent of which derive from the continental flow of goods and services - in order to force the relocation of production lines out of Canada and into the United States.
The whole point, as he reiterated today, ostensibly in response to Ontario premier Doug Ford’s 25 percent retaliatory surcharge on electricity sales to 1.5 million American homes and businesses, is to force Canada to surrender to American annexation, “to become our cherished 51st state.”
This had been going on for weeks when Chrystia Freeland finally decided that Justin Trudeau wasn’t taking matters seriously enough and just wasn’t up to the challenge. Her resignation from cabinet on December 16 triggered a caucus revolt and Trudeau’s resignation.
[A quick ‘full disclosure’ disclaimer. It can’t be said that the Trudeau Liberals are fond of me, but I’ve always had time for Freeland. We haven’t spoken in quite some while, but she was taking my calls long after her fellow cabinet ministers would scurry away at the mere mention of my name. Also: we’re both among about 300 Canadians sanctioned by Moscow and forbidden from ever returning to Russia. ]
Freeland had simply become too dangerous.
The thing about Freeland is that she had been warning about the rise of strongman politics and the fatal attraction of police-state appeasement for years, and when Trudeau came on the federal scene more than a decade ago he was as determined to partner with China’s Xi Jinping as Donald Trump is with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. By 2015, Trudeau had transformed the Liberal Party into the political wing of the Canada-China Business Council. So Team Trudeau was always an odd fit for Freeland.
From her arrival on the government benches in 2015, Freeland distinguished herself in Trudeau’s cabinet by refusing to acquiesce to collusions with autocracy. Freeland’s first run-in was with Trudeau’s first foreign affairs minister, the Chretien-era fixture Stéphane Dion. . .