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<\/p>\nIn Unreliable Boyfriend, one-time finance minister and deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland digs into how her political relationship with Justin Trudeau went from a warm face-to-face invite into public service to a cold Zoom call where he booted her from the finance role years later.<\/p>\n
While the book’s “unreliable boyfriend” is the United States under U.S. President Donald Trump, readers could be forgiven for thinking the title is actually inspired by Trudeau.<\/p>\n
She enthuses about how the pair worked together on the trade file, their management of the pandemic and their rollout of national child care. Yet she also details Trudeau’s slide into unpopularity, penchant for humiliating members of his cabinet, word-policing and tendency to pick on those weaker than him.<\/p>\n
While their relationship ended bitterly, she is still able to praise Trudeau for his strengths, one of which she noticed at a party in Toronto in late 2012, before Trudeau the Liberal MP became Trudeau the prime minister.<\/p>\n
At that party celebrating the launch of Freeland’s book Plutocrats, her father cornered Trudeau to convey his thoughts on politics, eager to speak with “Liberal political royalty.”<\/p>\n
“I was mortified,” Freeland recalled as she rushed over to try and free Trudeau from her father’s grip \u2014 only to learn that the future prime minister was enjoying the chat.<\/p>\n
WATCH | Trudeau and Freeland over the years:<\/p>\n
Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland over the years<\/p>\n
Canada’s recently resigned finance minister was an integral part of the prime minister’s government \u2014 until she wasn’t.<\/p>\n
The following summer Freeland was invited to a breakfast that included Trudeau and former Ontario premier and current MP Bob Rae.<\/p>\n
She was told Rae was stepping down from his Toronto seat and was asked if she’d consider running in an upcoming byelection.<\/p>\n
“I spent the next six weeks agonizing over Justin’s offer,” she wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She worried about uprooting her children from the life she and her husband had built for them in New York. And with the Liberals in third place, she knew she may be “joining a lost cause.”<\/p>\n
In the end she wrote that she was won over by “Trudeau’s kindness to my dad” and her father’s encouragement to accept the offer.<\/p>\n
Knowing when to play hardball<\/p>\n
One of Trump’s first moves as president was to sign an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. By the spring of 2017, Trump was also threatening to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).\u00a0<\/p>\n
The remaining TPP countries were set to sign the pact on the margins of a November summit in Da Nang, Vietnam. But Freeland, who was foreign affairs minister at the time, wrote that Trudeau wanted a better deal.<\/p>\n
In a call with then international trade minister Fran\u00e7ois-Philippe Champagne, Freeland and others, Trudeau humiliated Champagne for not securing concessions on intellectual property and other issues.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I still cringe as I remember it \u2014 the embarrassment I felt at hearing a colleague humiliated reminded me of feeling bad for my childhood friends in Peace River when they got spanked while I was over to play.”<\/p>\n
When Canada refused to sign the deal, Freeland wrote Trudeau angered both Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Despite that pushback, Freeland said she admired the defiance.<\/p>\n
“Trudeau showed that, love him or loathe him, you could not deny that he was a leader with balls,” she wrote.<\/p>\n
Freeland said with NAFTA talks coming up, it was important to let the White House know when it came to trade deals, Canada “was prepared to play hardball.”<\/p>\n
The ‘FAFO’ fight for free trade<\/p>\n
By early 2018, Freeland wrote she had grown so “worried that American proposals could kill NAFTA” she’d begun writing a speech to deliver after its demise.<\/p>\n
During particularly fraught meetings with U.S. officials in Washington, Freeland admitted she would occasionally “take refuge in the ladies’ washroom” which was a safe place because, she said, there were almost never any women on the U.S. side of the table.<\/p>\n
“Once, at a particularly dire moment, I got down on my knees on the cold white tiles in front of the sinks and prayed,” she wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Freeland said that Canada only managed to save that deal because it imposed retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. when it hit Canada with steel and aluminum tariffs, targeting key Republican districts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That “FAFO” approach, and Trudeau’s willingness to employ it, she wrote, was what ensured Canada got back to a “reciprocal relationship with our neighbour.”<\/p>\n
She said the details of the new NAFTA, an agreement Canadians now call the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), were largely left to her.<\/p>\n
Trudeau “got extremely involved in the fine print of his own public appearances \u2026 on trade he didn’t dive into the details,” she said.<\/p>\n
Still, she described the saving of NAFTA as “Trudeau’s finest hour \u2026 the moment when Canada’s playboy prince became a true national leader.”<\/p>\n
But Freeland says Trudeau’s political stock was already in decline on another front thanks to his ill-fated trip to India.<\/p>\n
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Trudeau, his then wife Sophie Gr\u00e9goire Trudeau and children Xavier and Ella-Grace are seen during their February 2018 trip to India. (Sean Kilpatrick\/The Canadian Press)<\/p>\n
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