Trudeau's Top Lieutenant Resigns Over Differences on Trump

The Washington Post reports Trudeau's Top Lieutenant Resigns Over Differences on Trump

Justin Trudeau's chief lieutenant throughout his tenure as Canada's prime minister resigned from his cabinet on Monday, citing differences over how to confront President-elect Donald Trump's "America First" economic nationalism, threatened tariffs and a possible trade war.

The abrupt resignation of Chrystia Freeland, who served the past four years as both finance minister and deputy prime minister, is the latest blow to the embattled Trudeau, whose popularity has nosedived over the past year. If federal elections were held today, polls project a wipeout for his Liberal Party.

In her resignation letter, posted on Freeland's X account Monday morning, shortly before she was scheduled to deliver a fallfiscal and economicupdate to Parliament, Freeland said Trudeau told her that he no longer wanted her to serve as his finance minister and offered her another cabinet role.

"Upon reflection, I have concluded that the only honest and viable path is for me to resign from the Cabinet," she said. "To be effective, a Minister must speak on behalf of the Prime Minister and with his full confidence. In making your decision, you made clear that I no longer credibly enjoy that confidence and possess the authority that comes with it."

Freeland — a former journalist whom Trudeau named foreign minister in 2017 as part of a cabinet shuffle designed to prepare the government for the first Trump administration — said that for several weeks, she and Trudeau had been "at odds about the best path forward for Canada," including on how best to respond to the "grave challenge" posed by the U.S. president-elect's threatened tariffs of 25 percent on Canadian imports. Canada sends three-quarters of its exports to the United States, and economists project that such levies could plunge Canada into a recession.

"We need to take that threat extremely seriously," Freeland said in her statement. "That means keeping our fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war. That means eschewing costly political gimmicks, which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment."