The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - January 05, 2026


2nd Liberal MP Resigning! Freeland quits on Carney for Ukraine!


Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

182.27657

Word count

3,121

Sentence count

170

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Chrystia Freeland resigns as economic advisor to Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Mark Carney tries to explain why she left her position as a Liberal MP to join the Ukraine's government.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Ladies and gentlemen, we got another one. Another liberal MP is going to be resigning
00:00:07.040 on Mark Carney. This, of course, being Chrystia Freeland, the former deputy prime minister under
00:00:13.640 Justin Trudeau and finance minister. She will be moving on not only to be the president of
00:00:19.560 the Road Society, but also apparently now an economic advisor to Vladimir Zelensky,
00:00:25.700 the president of Ukraine. This entire situation was rolled out very poorly and it kind of caused
00:00:32.360 a mini scandal for Carney at the beginning of the day because it looked like Freeland was going to
00:00:36.760 sit as an MP while also working for a foreign government, which was no bueno. This is also
00:00:42.900 coming on the heels of just a couple days ago, Nate Erskine-Smith making it clear that he will also
00:00:48.500 be resigning to go and run for the leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party. But let's break this
00:00:54.720 thing down in just a second. We're going to go through Vladimir Zelensky's post that ended up
00:00:58.880 causing a big issue and then what Freeland and Carney have now said since then. But before I get into it,
00:01:05.840 I just want to encourage you guys that if you like the channel, you can support it by joining the
00:01:10.120 membership program. It's just at the join button below the video. It just makes me less reliant on
00:01:15.940 the YouTube algorithm and makes the channel more sustainable for me. If you don't do that, perfectly
00:01:21.500 fine. Only do what you are comfortable with. You can also help out the channel by liking,
00:01:26.060 subscribing if you're not yet a subscriber, and of course leaving a comment with your thoughts
00:01:30.720 in the section below. So let's get into it from this Volodymyr Zelensky post first. And in all of
00:01:39.260 this, I know a lot of people use stuff like this to attack Ukraine. Ukraine is a corrupt country. That
00:01:45.780 is basically every Eastern European country. In all of this, I just find a lot of what Zelensky does
00:01:52.800 really silly. And if he made less stupid PR moves, the West would be so much more cohesively behind
00:02:00.160 Ukraine. If there was less corruption, everyone would be behind them more. But he keeps making
00:02:05.380 stupid mistakes, which is really just Eastern European politics in general. But he posted this
00:02:11.920 morning, another stupid PR move for him. Today, I appointed Chrystia Freeland as an advisor on 1.00
00:02:18.120 economic development. Chrystia is highly skilled in these matters, and has extensive experience in
00:02:24.460 attracting investment and implementing economic transformations. Oh, goodness, no. I'm wondering
00:02:29.840 if Carney secretly hates the Ukrainians, so he's sending Chrystia Freeland to them. But he goes on and
00:02:35.260 says, right now, Ukraine needs to strengthen its internal resilience, both for the sake of Ukraine's
00:02:40.940 recovery, if diplomacy delivers results as swiftly as possible, and to reinforce our defense, if because
00:02:47.460 of delays by our partners, it takes longer to bring this war to an end. I am grateful to everyone who
00:02:52.900 is ready to support our state and our engagement with partners' glory to Ukraine. Now, I don't really
00:02:59.260 want to get into the Ukraine-Russia war thing right here. I just don't really care. I think it's 0.98
00:03:04.120 genuinely a good thing that Russia does not get more territory than it already has. You know, 0.71
00:03:09.540 they were the ones battling Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and I'm very happy that Trump captured
00:03:14.840 Maduro. The Russian government is bad. I do not like them at all. That doesn't mean that Ukraine's
00:03:22.120 government is good, but in general, I think it's good for the borders to remain as they are and for 0.98
00:03:27.320 Russia to not gain anything. I don't want Ukraine gaining anything either. I just want it to be stopped.
00:03:31.840 But why would you appoint Christy Freeland into this position? Donald Trump doesn't like her.
00:03:38.300 She's annoying to the Americans. Why would you ever do this of yours landscape? It doesn't matter.
00:03:43.760 That will be the mystery of the Sphinx forevermore. I just want to move on now to some of the response
00:03:49.860 that this ended up generating, because it wasn't just from conservatives that took issue with it,
00:03:55.260 but I am going to start with a conservative. This obviously looked really, really bad for Mark
00:04:00.140 Carney. So Rachel Thomas, a conservative MP, responded to this and said, Christy Freeland
00:04:05.340 has accepted a role as an economic advisor to the president of Ukraine without resigning her seat
00:04:10.540 as MP. No matter the ally, this is a clear conflict of interest. Canadians elected her to represent them
00:04:16.920 in parliament, not to work for a foreign government. Christy Freeland must resign immediately.
00:04:21.660 And this is all sketchy since we just sent the Ukrainian government another $2.5 billion for
00:04:27.740 economic development. How much did Christy Freeland have a hand in organizing that? I'm not even
00:04:33.180 necessarily against aiding our allies, but did we overlook a lot of corruption issues and a lot of
00:04:39.500 other things that we needed safeguards for because Freeland was already planning on going to work
00:04:45.080 for Vladimir Zelensky? It's a legitimate question. Again, I actually don't mind spending
00:04:51.500 some money to prevent Russia from absorbing Ukraine, just as I would be okay with spending 0.99
00:04:56.220 some money if China tried to absorb Taiwan, because that would make the world a worse place. 0.94
00:05:01.740 But still, the corruption angle of all this is a problem. The conflict of interest angle of all this
00:05:06.940 is a problem. But of course, it was not just MPs like Rachel Thomas. We also had people like NDP
00:05:15.420 leader Don Davies reacting to this, saying that it was deeply inappropriate. I want to bring up that
00:05:21.020 now. And Don Davies said, who I normally will never agree with, Don Davies says,
00:05:28.460 While I respect Ms. Freeland, one cannot serve Canada and another country at the same time.
00:05:34.380 Taxpayers should not be paying for an absent MP, especially one working for a foreign government.
00:05:39.980 She must resign as MP immediately. And I had already kind of known at the start of the day,
00:05:45.420 based on everything else she was doing, like her agreeing to become the president of the Road
00:05:49.820 Society, she was probably not going to hold on as an MP and work for Zelensky at the same time. It's
00:05:56.780 probably that the messaging was rolled out in a bad way. She was supposed to announce she was
00:06:02.060 resigning, and then Zelensky was supposed to say his part. But Freeland, a little over an hour ago,
00:06:08.860 tried to do a bit of a cleanup job on this thing and said, Ukraine is at the forefront of today's 0.99
00:06:14.460 global fight for democracy, and I welcome this chance to contribute on an unpaid basis as an
00:06:19.980 economic advisor to President Zelensky. In accepting this voluntary position, I will be stepping aside
00:06:25.980 from my role as the Prime Minister's Special Representative for the Reconstruction of Ukraine.
00:06:31.420 In the coming weeks, I will also leave my seat in Parliament. I want to thank my constituents for their
00:06:36.060 years of confidence in me. I am so grateful to have being your representative." Well, apparently
00:06:42.380 they didn't really like her that much, because you will remember back in March, you know, March 2025's
00:06:48.940 liberal leadership race, that she actually didn't even win her own seat against Mark Carney. That's
00:06:54.860 if you believe the whole thing wasn't rigged. Like, I'm not someone who goes around claiming random
00:06:58.940 elections are rigged, but that liberal leadership race was probably rigged. Or at least all the candidates
00:07:04.780 other than Carney were not actually trying to sell memberships and win, and they were just letting
00:07:08.700 Carney win. Because how does Karina Gould, Chrystia Freeland, and all the other people running, I think
00:07:15.260 there's only another couple of them, but how did they not at least do better in their own riding? Even
00:07:21.100 if Freeland didn't just not win her riding, she lost her riding to Mark Carney by like a similar proportion
00:07:29.100 of the vote as she did in every other riding. Like, Freeland did as bad in like Regina as she did in her 0.95
00:07:36.300 own riding of University Rosedale. It was very, very strange. But we've been hearing for a long time
00:07:43.420 that she does not actually get along with Mark Carney, which is kind of surprising because he is the
00:07:48.620 godfather to one of her children. But it seems like because Carney was the economic advisor to Justin
00:07:55.420 Trudeau and he was pushing a lot of the really bad spending ideas and a lot of the really dumb
00:08:00.860 programs like the the the late 2024 GST freeze or HST freeze that caused lots of problems.
00:08:07.900 I think Freeland and Carney ended up kind of coming to loggerheads where she was being blamed for
00:08:14.540 implementing a lot of the dumb ideas that Trudeau forced her to implement, which were in fact Mark
00:08:20.140 Carney's ideas. So she ended up taking it on the chin in some cases, having to implement
00:08:25.340 a stupid idea from Mark Carney that Justin Trudeau forced her to do. But here is Prime Minister Mark
00:08:31.980 Carney's response to her. And he says, Thank you, Chrystia, for your important work as special
00:08:37.660 representative for the reconstruction of Ukraine. You are uniquely qualified for this important new role.
00:08:43.420 It is a further credit to Canada's steadfast support for Ukraine that a Canadian is taking on this role
00:08:48.380 at this crucial moment for Ukraine's future. Canada will continue to stand with Ukraine to ensure a
00:08:53.900 just and lasting peace. OK, the big elephant in the room here is that Carney is losing another MP.
00:09:01.820 So he's losing Nate Erskine Smith to run for the Ontario Liberal leadership.
00:09:06.380 He's losing Chrystia Freeland to the Rhodes Society and to Ukraine.
00:09:10.460 And he's probably also going to be losing Stephen Gilbeau as well as Jonathan Wilkinson.
00:09:14.540 And you've even had Melanie Jolie's name thrown in there as well. And there's a couple other people
00:09:19.820 like Bill Blair, some of these older Liberal MPs who are now just sitting as backbenchers or
00:09:25.580 parliamentary secretaries, very low level jobs, which at this point in your career, you're like
00:09:31.740 68, 72 years old. You know, some of these people like Henry Fry also might just resign because of their
00:09:37.420 age. You're really at that age just sitting as a backbencher or some minor advisor within caucus.
00:09:43.660 These people are probably going to end up leaving. And this is completely throwing a massive wrench,
00:09:49.820 like I said yesterday, into Carney's plan to try and coax conservatives over into joining the Liberal
00:09:56.220 Party, because what's the point of joining the Liberals when they don't actually even have power?
00:10:02.380 They don't have the majority. Don Stremont left for petty reasons. He didn't get to be deputy speaker
00:10:07.660 because the Conservatives voted for Tom Kamik. It had nothing to do with thumbing their nose at him.
00:10:11.820 He previously was in the role. They voted for somebody else, probably because Tom had maybe
00:10:15.740 been asking people to vote for him and making a good case for himself. There was no hard feelings
00:10:20.220 against Don Stremont. He got ticked off though and crossed the floor and joined the Liberals.
00:10:24.620 And then about a month later, a month and a half later, we have Michael Ma, right after attending
00:10:29.340 the Conservative Christmas party, announces that he is going over and joining the Liberals. And then he got
00:10:34.700 to go to their Christmas party too. Maybe he's just a really big Christmas guy. But he was probably
00:10:39.260 leaving because, well, if only one more guy leaves, then we will have a majority and maybe I get to
00:10:45.340 become a minister or I have some other important position in government and I get to get stuff done
00:10:50.460 and deliver things to my constituents and be an important political individual because I was the
00:10:56.220 one who caused this majority government to happen. But now, Carney doesn't just need one more Conservative,
00:11:02.860 he needs three more MPs, whether he elects two more Liberals in by-elections or he ends up having
00:11:10.060 three more Conservatives leave. The Conservatives, not that many Conservatives are crossing. In fact,
00:11:14.620 there's actually been Conservative MPs just blowing the whistle on the fact that Liberals are trying to
00:11:19.100 approach them to kind of coax them into leaving. Scott Reid posted something on his own social media
00:11:24.460 saying, yeah, they've been pursuing me for a long time and I keep saying, no, I'm not joining the party
00:11:29.900 that laughs at the plight of Canadians struggling economically because the Liberals just want to
00:11:34.780 thumb their noses at the Conservatives. So it seems like the fact that they're approaching people like
00:11:39.580 Scott Reid, at least to me, tells me that they actually don't know what Conservative MPs want to
00:11:46.460 cross. And definitely, probably no one wants to cross at this point. In Nate Erskine-Smith and
00:11:53.020 Chrystia Freeland's writings, there's a very low chance that anyone but a Liberal is going to win.
00:11:58.060 But this is still causing Carney to be in this awkward position where whenever a Liberal MP decides
00:12:04.780 to leave, it opens up a bigger gap in his party, at which time the Conservatives block and NDP could
00:12:11.020 get together and just vote no confidence and get rid of them. There is no requirement for people to
00:12:17.100 wait for Carney to fill that seat before a confidence vote is launched. An NDP could actually potentially
00:12:23.580 win Erskine-Smith or Freeland's ridings. Those are actually not complete, uh, outside chances. Now,
00:12:30.060 it's not the biggest, it's not the biggest probability in one of those two ridings, uh,
00:12:34.860 Beaches East York as Nate Erskine-Smith. And then of course, as I said before, uh, University
00:12:39.420 Rosedale as Chrystia Freeland's. It was actually a two-term Liberal occupied that seat, I believe,
00:12:44.300 I believe, like 2008 to 2015, uh, before Freeland got the seat. At least there was a Liberal between
00:12:50.860 2011 and 2015. Uh, but those two ridings, lesser chance of being lost. But if Gilbeau goes, that one
00:12:58.380 actually has a good chance of being won by either the NDP or the block, because Gilbeau was like the
00:13:03.660 first Liberal to win it since like the 80s or 90s. It had been a while. It was a NDP and then a Quebec,
00:13:09.580 uh, block, Quebec riding before him. And then Jonathan Wilkinson's riding, before it was him,
00:13:15.420 I think there was one more Liberal before him. Actually, I think it was just him. But before that,
00:13:19.500 it was an Alliance Reform Conservative riding. And yeah, maybe it's changed a lot and it's become more
00:13:25.500 Liberal, but you know, in a by-election, depending on the political atmosphere of the moment, you could
00:13:30.460 win that one. Remember, the Conservatives won Toronto Centre at the bottom of, of Justin Trudeau's
00:13:36.940 popularity. And the riding that Jonathan Wilkinson occupies is not nearly as strong as Toronto Centre
00:13:44.380 usually is for the Liberals. And then Melanie Jolie, some of these other people who might leave. Yeah,
00:13:49.580 very likely the Liberals still end up retaining these seats. But again, until a by-election is
00:13:55.020 called and actually held, the opposition has the ability to completely disrupt the Liberals from
00:14:00.940 actually getting anything done. Or they can even call a new confidence vote to throw this government
00:14:06.300 out and trigger a new federal election. So there is a lot of positive developments this year already
00:14:11.740 for the Conservatives. And I'm going to be coming back probably later today to talk more about how
00:14:17.420 the media is absolutely destroying themselves on this Nicolas Maduro story. Donald Trump was absolutely
00:14:24.220 right to capture Nicolas Maduro, but the media is trying to spin really, really hard against Trump,
00:14:30.620 because they know the Liberals only got elected this last election because of the Trump issue.
00:14:36.300 And now they're trying to generate a new anti-Trump movement in Canada in time for a potential new
00:14:42.700 snap federal election. I really don't think it's going to work because at the end of the day,
00:14:47.420 I think Canadians, even on the centre-left, dislike Nicolas Maduro more than they dislike Donald Trump.
00:14:54.140 Maybe people complain about Trump a lot, but communist dictator who murders people up against
00:14:59.740 Donald Trump, I think even at least moderate Liberals can understand why you should congratulate
00:15:06.060 Trump for capturing that guy, and Pierre Polyev was absolutely right to do it, and Carney looks like
00:15:10.940 an idiot by just dodging. He is just refusing to even name Donald Trump in any of his statements,
00:15:16.620 even though this is an objective Trump victory. Other Liberal politicians in other countries,
00:15:22.540 Democrats in the United States are congratulating Trump. Not all of them, but some of them. And
00:15:27.340 even in the US, there's more reason for them to take issue with Trump because, hey, partisan political,
00:15:32.220 you know, interests are at play here. But even some of those people are willing to congratulate Trump
00:15:38.060 because it's an objectively good thing to have happened. Anyways, well, with all that being said,
00:15:43.820 thank you guys for watching. I will be back sometime later or whatever. I'm actually screwing up the
00:15:49.100 end of this video. By the way, actually, no, I need to mention the fact that in my last two videos I
00:15:54.780 did on Venezuela, I am sorry, I could not pronounce... Why is every single time I try and say... Because
00:16:02.860 it was the capital of Colombia, and every time I make a video, I draw a blank and cannot say Bogota.
00:16:10.060 There we go. I said Bogota or something, because that's how it's written. And in the back of my mind,
00:16:14.220 I'm like, I know it's not Bogota. I know it's Bogota. And I had heard the name Bogota
00:16:19.900 tens of times because of certain documentaries I've listened to. But it's just the way these
00:16:23.660 videos work. I'm revealing how video creation works. I'll be like 14 minutes deep in a video.
00:16:29.580 I'll be reading something, and I will forget how to pronounce something I absolutely know how to
00:16:33.980 pronounce. But you got to white knuckle it. You just got to keep going. Because, goodness,
00:16:37.820 am I going to restart a video 14 minutes in because I couldn't say Bogota? But the guy who pointed it out to me,
00:16:43.580 fair enough. You got me on that one. I did respond to you on X. But that was a funny little thing,
00:16:48.540 because I have heard that name so many times and pronounced it right so many times. But as soon
00:16:53.740 as I'm in video mode, I go into just stupid moron mode, and I can't actually pronounce
00:16:58.940 like very well-known capitals. But anyways, with that all being said,
00:17:02.380 thank you guys for watching. I'll see you all later.