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.
00:00:00.000Hey 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.
00:00:20.580The 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.
00:00:44.820You 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.
00:00:55.920We 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,
00:01:19.380and 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.
00:01:29.340Now, 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,
00:01:38.040but 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.
00:01:55.340So, 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,
00:02:11.240and 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?
00:02:22.300So, 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.
00:02:34.600I 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.
00:02:40.700Erskine-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,
00:02:50.660he 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.
00:03:01.120Now, 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.
00:03:11.500So, 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.
00:03:26.460But, let's just read this. It's from the Honourable Christy Freeland, of course, Member of Parliament, University Rosedale.
00:03:33.580Well, 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.
00:03:46.000I do not intend to run in the next federal election.
00:03:49.120I 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.
00:04:01.260And, to Team Canada, I am so thankful.
00:04:05.080We did big things together. We signed a trade deal with Europe, we renegotiated NAFTA, and we got tariffs on steel and aluminum lifted.
00:04:12.460We saved lives, protected workers and businesses, and got through a pandemic.
00:04:17.040Well, by the way, we currently have tariffs under steel and aluminum.
00:04:20.600That'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.
00:04:28.740But now, under Carney and his new trade representatives, we have tariffs again, with Dominic LeBlanc heading that charge.
00:04:39.260We got through a pandemic while maintaining Canada's essential triple-A credit rating and the lowest debt and deficit in the G7.
00:04:48.320We welcomed many decent people seeking safety in our great country.
00:04:52.580We stood with Ukraine against dictatorship.
00:04:54.920We created a national system of affordability, early learning, and childcare.
00:04:59.020We built the Trans Mountain expansion, and we made historical investments in AI, critical minerals, clean technologies, and nuclear power.
00:05:06.920Our country is stronger because of what we accomplished together.
00:05:10.280I 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.
00:05:21.440I am very grateful to have had the chance to support Prime Minister Carney and our new government in building one strong national economy.
00:05:29.220Mark Carney is an unifier in a time of crisis, and I have absolute confidence in his ability to lead us through it.
00:05:35.360A great strength of democracy is that no one holds office in perpetuity.
00:05:39.780After 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.
00:05:47.860Now, 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.
00:06:12.720I 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.
00:06:52.400Now, 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.
00:07:18.500Because 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.
00:07:29.280It's almost like your new constituency is Ukraine, and so, if anything, you really shouldn't be an MP at the same time.
00:07:36.360But again, that would be great because it would be allowing the conservatives if Erskine Smith and Freeland go away and hopefully Bill Blair.
00:07:45.840Although 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.
00:07:59.160In 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.
00:08:09.040Because 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.
00:08:24.340It'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.
00:08:35.480And 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.
00:08:51.080Because the GTA is going to be key in the next election.
00:08:54.360I'm not like some conventional wisdom conservative strategist who think all the fortunes lie in the GTA.
00:09:00.260I 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.
00:09:09.140But again, if you're doing well in the GTA, you're doing way better everywhere else.
00:09:15.380It was a big indication that Trudeau had to step down when they lost the Toronto St. Paul's by-election to the conservatives.
00:09:22.740That's just never a riding that the liberals should lose.
00:09:39.660And now we also are seeing probably the face swap is wearing off very quickly.
00:09:44.400The 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.
00:09:54.420So, I'm not going to say good riddance.
00:10:06.100But, you know, wish her well on her new role.
00:10:09.280Special Envoy to Ukraine probably couldn't be messed up by anybody.
00:10:12.320But 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.
00:10:28.820The thing I hear from the background is that obviously people like to work with who they like to work with.
00:10:35.960You know, if you're friends with someone, you probably like working with them.
00:10:39.740If you just, you know, people like to work with people they gel with on a personality basis.
00:10:45.260But I've heard that that is cranked up to 11 with Mark Carney.
00:10:49.520Nate Erskine Smith is not my kind of politician at all.
00:10:53.760He is a very liberal liberal, a vegan who wants to basically add extra taxes on meat.
00:11:06.220But 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.
00:11:18.500I think Carney likes hanging out with guys who dress like him, who talk like him, who kind of run in the same elite circles.
00:11:27.220Erskine Smith is an elitist, but in a different way to Mark Carney.
00:11:33.180He 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.
00:11:40.140That's actually things I think he actually values more than competence alone.
00:11:44.480Now, Freeland was not competent, but the people that he's replaced Freeland with are probably less competent than even she was.
00:11:55.880And so that, I think, is going to be telling about how the liberal government is going to be performing in the future.
00:12:01.280They can keep presenting themselves as the team to lead us through a crisis.
00:12:05.220But 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.
00:13:15.840And 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.
00:13:29.240But this is more like the old Pierre right here.
00:13:33.620Mr. 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.
00:13:45.020And what is the real human consequence of that?
00:13:49.100Food price inflation is rising 70% faster than the Bank of Canada's target.
00:13:55.180And today, the CEO of the major food bank network in Toronto says that there has been a 400% increase in food bank use there.
00:14:05.800Does the prime minister understand that his empty promises lead to empty stomachs?
00:14:09.740The 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.
00:14:21.920I'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.
00:14:28.620Like, for example, reducing the taxes for 22 million Canadians, Mr. Speaker.