I wrote the book on Chrystia Freeland. Her career has been spent making men look good. Now it’s her turn
Opinion for the Toronto Star
Federal Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland has supported men long enough - now it’s her turn to be lifted.
Canadians will be familiar with Chrystia Freeland as Justin Trudeau’s second-in-command; his trusted fixer and right-hand woman. Since the Liberal government’s stunning win in the 2015 federal election, she has held a series of prominent cabinet posts: international trade, foreign affairs, intergovernmental affairs and finance.
To understand Freeland’s dramatic falling out with Trudeau this week — to grasp the betrayal that led her to abandon the person most responsible for her remarkable rise in government — it’s helpful to consider her long history as a loyal supporter of powerful men.
In 1999, at 31, Freeland left her job as UK news editor at the Financial Times in London to become deputy editor of the Globe and Mail in Toronto. The Globe’s new editor, Richard Addis, was a British Fleet Street transplant who was almost comically ill-informed about Canada.
“Richard was the editor, but spent more of his time criss-crossing the country, meeting the people who mattered in Canada,” says Geoff Beattie, at the time the consigliere to the Thomson family, who owned the Globe. Addis became the “guy who got invited to everybody’s dinner parties” and Freeland — pregnant with her first child — was “putting the paper to bed every night.”
On the morning of September 11, 2001, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, and air travel was halted. With Addis stuck in England, where he had been visiting family, Freeland was left in charge of the entire newsroom — her most important management challenge to date. “The energy on that day, and then the days that followed, was like nothing I’ve ever seen. We did amazing — journalists everywhere did amazing work. And for the Globe, Chrystia was leading it,” says Globe columnist Andrew Willis.
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