Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland likes to give big speeches. Since joining the Council of Ministers in 2015, the former journalist at FinancialTimes of London has distinguished herself among her colleagues in Justin Trudeau’s government by launching bold ideas that are being talked about far beyond Canada’s borders.
The one who was named “diplomat of the year” by the American magazine Foreign Policy in 2018, before being awarded a similar distinction in 2020 from the think tank American Freedom House, has become the darling of a certain global intellectual elite for whom it constitutes an antidote to the rampant Trumpism that infects public life almost everywhere in the West. However, it is clear that the great ideas formulated by Mrs.me Freeland over the years have remained a political dead letter.
As Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2017, Mme Freeland had given a landmark speech in the House of Commons, proposing that Canada take greater leadership on the international stage to protect the rules-based global order at a time when the United States, under Donald Trump, seemed to have abandoned its traditional role. “Having our friend and ally question the value of his global leadership brings into sharper focus the need for the rest of us to clearly establish our own sovereignist direction,” she said. Relying solely on the protective shield of the United States would make us a client state. Although we have an excellent relationship with our American friends and neighbours, such a dependency would not be in Canada’s interest. »
The speech of M.me Freeland was to be followed by a substantial increase in Canadian military spending by the Canadian government. But the major reinvestment in the armed forces never came. In 2021, military spending accounted for 1.36% of the country’s gross domestic product, roughly the same proportion as in 2017. Even in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Russia’s latest budget Mme Freeland expected only a slight increase in military spending in the next few years. At most, the proportion of GDP devoted to national defense would increase to 1.5% in 2027, still far below the 2% threshold required of member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO ).
This is precisely the reason why one is entitled to wonder whether the last great speech of Mrs.me Freeland, the one delivered last week in front of the Brookings Institution in Washington and which everyone in Ottawa has been talking about since, deserves all the attention that the Canadian media gives it. Of course, M.me Freeland appears to have offended many of his liberal colleagues by saying that democratic countries will have to be “prepared to take some domestic political loss of favor to safeguard the economic security of our democratic partners.”
For Canada, the application of this principle would require an acceleration of “the realization of the energy and mining projects that our allies need to heat their homes and manufacture electric vehicles”. These remarks go against the statements of Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, for whom liquefied natural gas projects are definitely not on his list of priorities.
The same is true for the plea made by Mr.me Freeland in favor of the friendshoring (or “amilocalisation” in the French text of his speech), this concept according to which the democracies of the world strengthen their trade links in order to avoid “strategic vulnerabilities” vis-à-vis autocratic countries, including Russia and the China. According to Mme Freeland, Western countries are now paying the price for opening up their markets to undemocratic countries in recent decades in the hope that collective enrichment would make the world more democratic and peaceful. “The economic ties that were meant to calm Russia’s belligerent impulses serve, on the contrary, to blunt our response to the Kremlin’s war crimes […] China also skilfully and voluntarily exploits its economic ties with us to achieve its geopolitical objectives. »
However, it is far from certain that the Trudeau government, which advocated the negotiation of a free trade agreement with China at the time when Ms.me Freeland was still in Foreign Affairs, wants to favor the hard line towards Beijing. The Indo-Pacific strategy that the current Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mélanie Joly, is working on would aim to strengthen trade and military cooperation with our allies in the region without provoking a hostile reaction from China. The speech of M.me Freeland will not have made it easy for him.
To tell the truth, the speech of Mme Freeland sounded like a statement from a NATO secretary general, rather than a policy statement from a cabinet minister in Mr. Trudeau’s government. If the latter does not soon signal his intention to leave politics before the next election, leaving the way clear for his deputy prime minister, rumors that Mme Freeland about to accept a position in NATO or another international body will inevitably gain momentum. And his last speech will do nothing to silence them.