The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - September 16, 2025


Chrystia Freeland is OUT! Poilievre roasts Carney's incompetence as PM

Topics
Chrystia Freeland resignation letter
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Mark Carney Speaker Nate Erskine-Smith Justin Trudeau Bill Blair Gregor Robertson Francois-Philippe Champagne Pierre Poilievre Sean Fraser Chrystia Freeland Neil Hetherington Tara Armstrong Donald Trump Pierre Pauly Dallas Brody La Salle Marder
Carney will have a Liberal MP resign on him! Mark Carney may lose 5 Liberal MPs - Liberal infighting begins!

Episode Stats


Length

20 minutes

Words per minute

169.63

Word count

3,473

Sentence count

199

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Chrystia Freeland has resigned from Prime Minister Mark Carney's cabinet, and this is not shocking at all. The timing is sort of surprising, but I think a lot of people suspected that Mark Carney and Chrystie Freeland didn't get along very well. Now, she is the special envoy to Ukraine, and she could sit as an MP while she is carrying out that role. But I suspect, based on what she says in her letter, that she is going to resign her seat entirely, probably within the next year.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. So, Chrystia Freeland is out. The former Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister under Justin Trudeau, and then the Transportation Minister under Mark Carney, has resigned from Prime Minister Mark Carney's cabinet, and this is not shocking at all.
00:00:20.580 The timing is sort of surprising, but I think a lot of people suspected that Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland didn't get along very well. Now, she is the special envoy to Ukraine, and she could sit as an MP while she is carrying out that role, but I suspect, based on what she says in her letter, that she is going to be resigning her seat entirely, probably within the next year.
00:00:44.820 You just wouldn't say the sorts of things that she did in the letter if you were not going to eventually step away, at the very least not running for re-election in the next federal election.
00:00:55.920 We just talked yesterday about Beech's East York Liberal MP, Nate Erskine-Smith, likely to be resigning his seat, and now we have it happening with Freeland, and now I'm also hearing it may also happen with Bill Blair, who has pretty much been a cabinet minister ever since he entered federal politics, and is currently just a backbench Liberal MP,
00:01:19.380 and it sounds like he is fairly disgruntled and feeling like he is already coming towards the end of his career anyways, and so he may also walk out.
00:01:29.340 Now, I mostly want to focus on Chrystia Freeland today. Naturally, we talked about Erskine-Smith yesterday, and we will be talking about Bill Blair in the future,
00:01:38.040 but her case is particularly interesting as someone who has been such a central figure in this Liberal government since 2015, and is now suddenly just making herself irrelevant in the narrative that's taking place, in sort of the story of this Liberal government.
00:01:55.340 So, I want to get into it with you guys in just a second, but first, just a reminder that if you like the show, make sure to leave a like on this video, subscribe to the channel if you are not yet a subscriber, help me get to 100,000 subscribers before the end of this year,
00:02:11.240 and then also leave a comment on what you think is going on right now. Do you think these people are actually going to resign, or do you think they are just going to stay to the backbenches of the Liberal government?
00:02:22.300 So, let's get into this letter. Now, although all three of these MPs I've mentioned are disgruntled, it's kind of funny that it's all for different reasons, but it's all also very similar.
00:02:34.600 I think they all don't like Mark Carney, they don't get along with Mark Carney, and that's why these people are moving on.
00:02:40.700 Erskine-Smith got to be a minister for about three months to entice him back into running for re-election, and then right after the election, despite Carney making him the housing minister,
00:02:50.660 he not only dropped him as housing minister and replaced him with Gregor Robertson, the former Vancouver mayor, but he also didn't give Erskine-Smith anything.
00:03:01.120 Now, I don't think that Freeland's dream job was ever transportation minister, but I feel like if she felt like she was a big enough player inside the cabinet, she would be staying.
00:03:11.500 So, let's read this and see what kind of other clues we get from it, and then later on in this video, I do want to get to some parliamentary question period barbs being thrown between Pierre Polyev and, I believe, Philippe Champagne.
00:03:26.460 But, let's just read this. It's from the Honourable Christy Freeland, of course, Member of Parliament, University Rosedale.
00:03:33.580 Well, dear neighbours, dear Canadians, with tremendous gratitude and a little sadness, I have decided to step down from cabinet today and turn the page on this chapter in my life.
00:03:46.000 I do not intend to run in the next federal election.
00:03:49.120 I am forever grateful to my constituents for trusting me and electing me five times, and I would like to thank Prime Minister Carney and Prime Minister Trudeau for the privilege of serving in their cabinets over the past decade.
00:04:01.260 And, to Team Canada, I am so thankful.
00:04:05.080 We did big things together. We signed a trade deal with Europe, we renegotiated NAFTA, and we got tariffs on steel and aluminum lifted.
00:04:12.460 We saved lives, protected workers and businesses, and got through a pandemic.
00:04:17.040 Well, by the way, we currently have tariffs under steel and aluminum.
00:04:20.600 That's kind of a funny barb against Carney that previously, when Christy Freeland was in charge of all this stuff and leading the negotiations, we didn't have tariffs.
00:04:28.740 But now, under Carney and his new trade representatives, we have tariffs again, with Dominic LeBlanc heading that charge.
00:04:37.460 And then, so she moves on to say,
00:04:39.260 We got through a pandemic while maintaining Canada's essential triple-A credit rating and the lowest debt and deficit in the G7.
00:04:48.320 We welcomed many decent people seeking safety in our great country.
00:04:52.580 We stood with Ukraine against dictatorship.
00:04:54.920 We created a national system of affordability, early learning, and childcare.
00:04:59.020 We built the Trans Mountain expansion, and we made historical investments in AI, critical minerals, clean technologies, and nuclear power.
00:05:06.920 Our country is stronger because of what we accomplished together.
00:05:10.280 I entered political life when the Liberal Party was in third place in Parliament, and I am proud that we have since won the support of Canadians in four elections, including Prime Minister Carney's historical election this spring.
00:05:21.440 I am very grateful to have had the chance to support Prime Minister Carney and our new government in building one strong national economy.
00:05:29.220 Mark Carney is an unifier in a time of crisis, and I have absolute confidence in his ability to lead us through it.
00:05:35.360 A great strength of democracy is that no one holds office in perpetuity.
00:05:39.780 After 12 fulfilling years in public life, I know that now is the right time for me to make way for others to seek fresh challenges for myself.
00:05:47.860 Now, that is specifically the line where it's kind of indicating right now that she's not going to make it a 13th or 14th year, because in theory, if she ends up running, like, you know, running out the clock and just sending it back as a backbencher MP and envoy to Ukraine, she would end up extending that a few extra years and turning it into, like, you know, 14 years or so.
00:06:12.720 I believe she was elected in a by-election in University of Rosedale in 2013, and in the future, if she stayed on, it would be making it longer than 12, which she said is enough.
00:06:22.420 And she says,
00:06:52.400 Now, I understand thanking the ministerial staff there, but the fact that you're thanking your constituency staff and your electoral district association makes it sound like you're leaving tomorrow, and then you're just going to be this kind of unelected envoy position going forward.
00:07:18.500 Because I would assume if you're the special envoy to Ukraine, you're not going to be spending as much time in your constituency talking to the people that elected you.
00:07:29.280 It's almost like your new constituency is Ukraine, and so, if anything, you really shouldn't be an MP at the same time. 0.93
00:07:36.360 But again, that would be great because it would be allowing the conservatives if Erskine Smith and Freeland go away and hopefully Bill Blair.
00:07:45.840 Although these are generally safe seats in the GTA area, you still get to test your mettle in these seats shortly after Mark Carney was able to win the election, seeing if there's faltering in the liberal ranks.
00:07:59.160 In the future, I actually will be doing, probably tomorrow, a whiteboard video on how all of the pollsters are currently showing the strength of the liberal government.
00:08:09.040 Because although many of these pollsters I don't like because they have a more liberal urban sample that kind of throws off the numbers, even if you just follow those bad pollsters, you will still notice a diminishing of support for the liberals.
00:08:24.340 It's still probably over-polling them, but considering how much it's over-polling them by, they're still falling backward, which means that they're probably even further down than those polls are saying.
00:08:35.480 And I think that having these three people exit office gives him the opportunity to test if the conservatives are going to be bouncing back in these areas that they got absolutely crushed in in the 2025 election.
00:08:51.080 Because the GTA is going to be key in the next election.
00:08:54.360 I'm not like some conventional wisdom conservative strategist who think all the fortunes lie in the GTA.
00:09:00.260 I actually think it's mostly in cleaning up more in southwestern Ontario and Atlantic Canada and then just grabbing a couple extra seats in the GTA.
00:09:09.140 But again, if you're doing well in the GTA, you're doing way better everywhere else.
00:09:15.380 It was a big indication that Trudeau had to step down when they lost the Toronto St. Paul's by-election to the conservatives.
00:09:22.740 That's just never a riding that the liberals should lose.
00:09:25.260 And so that was the big signal.
00:09:27.420 And then La Salle, Marder, Dunham, Montreal, losing it to the Bloc Québécois was the big red flag that everyone's seat could be in jeopardy if they don't pull the plug on Trudeau and try and do this quick face swap.
00:09:39.660 And now we also are seeing probably the face swap is wearing off very quickly.
00:09:44.400 The honeymoon is over, not only based on the polling, but based on the fact that the issue of Donald Trump in America is quickly falling down in the levels of importance to Canadians.
00:09:54.420 So, I'm not going to say good riddance.
00:09:59.680 Goodbye to Chrystia Freeland.
00:10:01.880 She was a bad minister. 1.00
00:10:03.360 She was a bad deputy prime minister. 1.00
00:10:06.100 But, you know, wish her well on her new role.
00:10:09.280 Special Envoy to Ukraine probably couldn't be messed up by anybody.
00:10:12.320 But if she goes and make Erskine Smith go, I wonder how much this is going to start tainting a lot of people's sort of sight of Mark Carney, a lot of liberals' impression of him that they're seeing all these other liberals kind of giving this silent unendorsement to the way he does things.
00:10:28.820 The thing I hear from the background is that obviously people like to work with who they like to work with.
00:10:35.960 You know, if you're friends with someone, you probably like working with them.
00:10:39.740 If you just, you know, people like to work with people they gel with on a personality basis.
00:10:45.260 But I've heard that that is cranked up to 11 with Mark Carney.
00:10:49.520 Nate Erskine Smith is not my kind of politician at all.
00:10:53.760 He is a very liberal liberal, a vegan who wants to basically add extra taxes on meat.
00:11:00.480 He is a big green transition guy.
00:11:03.660 Again, I'm obviously a conservative.
00:11:06.220 But the fact that Carney made him minister for three months and then immediately kicked him to the curb for Gregor Robertson, who has a terrible history on the housing issue in Vancouver, is very telling.
00:11:18.500 I think Carney likes hanging out with guys who dress like him, who talk like him, who kind of run in the same elite circles.
00:11:27.220 Erskine Smith is an elitist, but in a different way to Mark Carney.
00:11:31.060 He wears rolled up sleeves.
00:11:33.180 He doesn't always put on a jacket, where Carney seems to actually care what kind of shoes you wear and what kind of suit you're wearing.
00:11:40.140 That's actually things I think he actually values more than competence alone.
00:11:44.480 Now, Freeland was not competent, but the people that he's replaced Freeland with are probably less competent than even she was.
00:11:55.880 And so that, I think, is going to be telling about how the liberal government is going to be performing in the future.
00:12:01.280 They can keep presenting themselves as the team to lead us through a crisis.
00:12:05.220 But when Mark Carney has picked everyone based on the color of the laces in their shoes, well, I don't think we're actually going to see a lot of progress because he has not only his plans are very bloated, requiring more bureaucracy to be created, but the people he is putting at the tops of those bureaucracy are just people he likes to have a glass of scotch with.
00:12:24.360 That's kind of it.
00:12:25.380 But now, let's move on to question period, because I did think that Pierre Polly of today got a couple good zings in on Mark Carney.
00:12:35.780 Now, Mark Carney was not there answering questions himself.
00:12:38.980 I believe it was Philippe Champagne, if this is him.
00:12:42.640 I mix up a lot of liberals.
00:12:45.420 Yesterday, people were, like, covering Polly of being back in Parliament live.
00:12:50.280 If I didn't really care to, because I knew that Polly of probably wasn't going to come out of the gates swinging, people wanted that.
00:12:58.140 But when you lost your seat in Carlton, then you had to wait for a by-election in Bell River Crowfoot to get back in.
00:13:03.920 Naturally, and it's just the right thing to do.
00:13:05.900 You're going to be a little bit more toned down the first day. 0.69
00:13:08.800 You know, take your little humble slap to the head and say, yeah, yeah, you know, we got arrogant in Carlton.
00:13:14.080 We didn't do our job.
00:13:15.320 He lost.
00:13:15.840 And so while he was jabbing at Carney, it was a far more respectable, well, I would like the prime minister to let me know why these things they promised to do have not been done yet, or we haven't heard anything about it.
00:13:27.380 It was a little bit more like that.
00:13:29.240 But this is more like the old Pierre right here.
00:13:33.620 Mr. Speaker, the prime minister promised that he would spend less, yet he's spending, his deficit spending is 100% more, more than even Justin Trudeau.
00:13:45.020 And what is the real human consequence of that?
00:13:49.100 Food price inflation is rising 70% faster than the Bank of Canada's target.
00:13:55.180 And today, the CEO of the major food bank network in Toronto says that there has been a 400% increase in food bank use there.
00:14:05.800 Does the prime minister understand that his empty promises lead to empty stomachs?
00:14:09.740 The honourable minister of finance, Mr. Speaker, it's reassuring to hear the leader of the opposition that listened to the prime minister during the summer.
00:14:21.920 I'm glad to see that he retained that we're going to spend less so we can invest more, Mr. Speaker, and investing more in Canadians.
00:14:28.620 Like, for example, reducing the taxes for 22 million Canadians, Mr. Speaker.
00:14:35.040 Okay, my goodness.
00:14:36.780 No, they're reducing the taxes for 22 million Canadians by like $400.
00:14:42.900 Like, get out of here.
00:14:44.100 I saw the minimum that you could get back is like $250, and the highest you could get back is like maybe $600. 0.98
00:14:49.580 Like, it's so pathetic. 0.81
00:14:51.640 That doesn't make your life better outside of the most abstract definition that if I give you a dollar, your life is a dollar better. 0.98
00:14:59.420 Yeah, these people's lives are $400 better on average, but also who cares?
00:15:05.080 I would like people to get as much money back from the government as seemingly possible.
00:15:08.920 But when you get so little back, that's kind of a problem because you have the opportunity to do something,
00:15:16.280 and you wasted it to basically give them back nothing.
00:15:18.920 Making sure that people who want a first-time home buy a first-time home will pay less in GST, Mr. Speaker.
00:15:25.860 Making sure that we eliminate the consumer carbon tax, Mr. Speaker.
00:15:30.600 I think the leaders should celebrate that this government is there for families across Canada to build a stronger and more...
00:15:37.940 Well, I can't believe the liberals got rid of the consumer carbon tax when they were the only ones with the actual power to do it,
00:15:45.360 and it took them years and multiple elections of being attacked on that issue before they actually did anything about it.
00:15:52.420 Oh, my goodness. I can't believe they...
00:15:54.420 Oh, we did it, and you didn't do it.
00:15:56.400 It's like, wow, who could have guessed how, why they did it, and we didn't do it?
00:15:59.360 The Honourable Leader of the Opposition.
00:16:03.660 Mr. Speaker, he wants us to celebrate his failures, including failures that are leading to real human suffering.
00:16:09.620 Let me quote the CEO of Daily Bread Food Bank, Neil Hetherington.
00:16:13.160 So, giving you some context, previously, before the pandemic, we were at 600,000 for the year visits to the food bank.
00:16:20.180 And so, it took 38 years to get a million visits per year, and then only one year to get 2 million visits, another year to get 3 million.
00:16:27.740 Now, we are at 4 million visits.
00:16:30.940 Food bank lineups are growing and growing at an accelerating rate under this prime minister.
00:16:36.220 Does he realize the very real human consequences of his broken liberal promises?
00:16:43.160 The Honourable Minister of Natural Resources.
00:16:48.020 Mr. Speaker, I'm here to announce some good news.
00:16:51.320 Last night, can't...
00:16:52.380 Okay, and so, they're literally not even going.
00:16:55.560 Here's the problem with the Liberal Party, is party loyalty is always kind of one of those toxic things I'm not a big fan of,
00:17:03.000 in terms of, you know, MPs are oftentimes people who are very close to the leader, very friendly with the leader,
00:17:08.820 and sometimes competence doesn't even come into the equation.
00:17:11.740 But the Liberals also just lack charisma.
00:17:15.200 I find that they're not even fast on their feet.
00:17:17.940 I help write questions for MLAs in British Columbia for Tara Armstrong and Dallas Brody.
00:17:25.840 It's not hard to, like, train somebody or even be somebody who is able to, when someone throws something at you,
00:17:32.960 you can pivot in a way that doesn't make you look like you're scared.
00:17:36.060 These people cannot answer anything.
00:17:39.340 And their pivots are so obvious, it makes them look worse.
00:17:41.800 And British Columbia approved the new Silasum LNG export terminal in northern British Columbia.
00:17:49.520 It's with the destination.
00:17:51.800 It will be the second largest private sector investment in the history of this country.
00:17:57.200 It's the second largest in the history of this country.
00:18:01.660 It will employ thousands of Canadians.
00:18:05.840 We would love the Conservatives to help us build Canada.
00:18:11.260 The Honourable Leader of the Opposition.
00:18:13.160 Mr. Speaker, the question was not about re-announcing a previously approved project.
00:18:18.340 It was about the cost of food.
00:18:20.380 And frankly, it is insulting.
00:18:22.800 We have asked ten questions about the cost of food in the last two days,
00:18:26.580 and not a single Liberal minister will get up and answer it.
00:18:29.340 Maybe that's because the inflation rate on food is 70% above the target.
00:18:33.540 Maybe it's because there are now four times as many visits to Toronto food banks
00:18:38.940 as there were three and a half years ago.
00:18:41.680 Maybe it's because they broke their promise to stabilize food prices.
00:18:45.040 Maybe it's because the Prime Minister promised that he could be judged on the price of food.
00:18:50.020 Speaking of which, what's the verdict?
00:18:54.080 The Honourable Minister of Housing and Infrastructure.
00:18:57.900 Oh yeah, the Minister of Housing, Sean Frazier, is here to tell us about the food.
00:19:01.980 Obviously, that's what he's going to start saying.
00:19:03.720 Mr. Speaker, while I know we're all in this house concerned about the price of food,
00:19:07.580 and we're all...
00:19:07.920 Well, it wasn't Sean Frazier, but he was the previous one.
00:19:10.020 Now he's the AG for some reason.
00:19:12.160 It's Greg Robertson, who I mentioned earlier in the video.
00:19:14.520 So concerned about our farmers.
00:19:16.760 The number one cost of living in Canada is related to housing, Mr. Speaker.
00:19:21.300 And as I mentioned yesterday, people are concerned about housing prices.
00:19:26.000 Okay, there should be some law that in Parliament,
00:19:28.960 if someone asks you a reasonable question, it's not a law,
00:19:33.320 but there should just be a general rule that the Speaker enforces.
00:19:36.420 If someone asks you a legitimate question about food,
00:19:41.560 you have to at least address the subject of food.
00:19:45.920 It can't be like, well, speaking of food, housing prices are very high,
00:19:50.280 and we have this modular home project that's not going to address that at all.
00:19:55.100 But you can live in a building that looks like a carnival concession stand.
00:20:01.380 So that's kind of related to food, and we're solving that problem.
00:20:06.040 Back to you.
00:20:07.240 And like that, it's so bad.
00:20:09.100 Anyways, no doubt I'll be covering more Question Period in the future.
00:20:12.740 Freeland's out.
00:20:13.480 Looks like Erskine Smith is out.
00:20:15.460 Bill Blair hopefully is out.
00:20:17.220 And I invite a lot of other liberals to join them on their way out the door.
00:20:21.300 But anyways, with that being said, thank you guys for watching.
00:20:25.200 Like, share, and subscribe.
00:20:26.380 And I will see you guys next time.