In a revelation that manages to be both entirely unsurprising and yet still somehow shocking, former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland writes in her memoir that weeping and bullying were routine in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet meetings.
Freeland’s memoir, Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider’s View of Dealing with a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats, and Other Complicated People, was released yesterday, and the “unreliable boyfriend” is intended to be a reference to President Donald Trump. But her account, despite a robust defense of the team she helped to lead for a decade, reveals that emotional incontinence was also a defining feature of the Trudeau government.
“Crying was routine at cabinet meetings,” Freeland wrote. Read that again and let it sink in a moment: Crying was routine in a room full of adults who were leading Canada. As the Toronto Starput it in its review of Freeland’s book:
Kleenex was kept on hand for ministers overcome with emotion (Freeland doesn’t say exactly who or why) and some would get hugs from the PM. At the same time, she was appalled when Trudeau openly bullied people around him and policed the language used at the cabinet table. At one point, “a very progressive female colleague” casually referred to something as “crazy,” earning her a “long, harsh public scolding from Trudeau” on the grounds it was insulting to people with mental health issues. Ministers were told to call things “bananas” instead.
In case you’re wondering what the difference between “crazy” and “bananas” is in Trudeau-world, let me explain: Someone who is “crazy” would have been eligible for a lethal injection under the Trudeau government’s 2021 euthanasia legislation. Someone who is merely “bananas” would not qualify. You can see why Trudeau might have been a stickler for such things. (The Carney government has now promised to put forward legislation reversing eligibility for those suffering solely from mental illness but expanding it to those with “advance directives.”)
If a conservative journalist had reported that the Trudeau team were regularly weeping behind closed doors in cabinet meetings, the claim would have been written off as a right-wing fever dream. But again, Freeland says that this was routine. Meanwhile, Freeland wrote that Trudeau rarely – if ever – bothered to meet individually with his cabinet ministers and affirms that the Justin Trudeau Halloween Tour of India really was as bad as we all knew it was.
I am surely not the only one for whom Freeland’s breezy revelations raise more questions than they answer. Who was routinely crying? Why? Was it the defense minister? How did the other fully grown adults react? Did people look at each other awkwardly? When was it decided that Kleenex was going to be necessary at cabinet meetings?
Despite Freeland’s insistence that the Trudeau years were fundamentally a success – she has the guts to cite the federal response to COVID as an example – it was not. The Trudeau years brought us the euthanasia regime that turned us into an international pariah, a wave of church-burnings, a surge in antisemitism, LGBT extremism, and scores of radical appointments to the senate and the bench. That’s not even getting into inflation, the fiscal mess, and the never-ending banana republic scandals perpetrated by a feckless political heir. It’s amazing how much damage a government can do when everyone is both an idealogue and bad at their jobs.
As it turns out, we were governed by people who couldn’t meet without sniveling. Now, Freeland is dining out on her anti-Trump credentials, Trudeau is dancing in Home Depot with Katy Perry, and we are stuck with the bill and a broken country.
