Chrystia Freeland

Chrystia Freeland resigned as Canada's finance minister on the morning she was due to deliver a fiscal statement, and the government fell within months. She grew up in Alberta, studied at Harvard and Oxford, and spent two decades as a journalist - Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, deputy editor of the Globe and Mail, editor at Reuters - writing on the Russian oligarchy and on global wealth concentration. She entered Parliament in 2013 and was Trudeau's trade minister during the renegotiation of NAFTA, where she led the Canadian side against an American administration that had threatened to leave, then foreign minister, then deputy prime minister and finance minister through the pandemic. Russia has banned her from entry since 2014; she is of Ukrainian descent and has been a consistent advocate of arming Ukraine. In December 2024, hours before presenting the fall economic statement, she published a resignation letter saying the prime minister had told her he wanted her out of the portfolio and that she disagreed with costly political gimmicks at a moment when Canada faced the threat of American tariffs. The statement was tabled by someone else that afternoon with a deficit far larger than forecast. Trudeau announced his own resignation the following month. She ran for the leadership and was beaten decisively by Mark Carney, and stayed in cabinet under him. Her books Sale of the Century and Plutocrats were written before she entered politics and are unusually specific about how post-Soviet privatisation created the class she later helped sanction. She was the first woman to serve as Canada's finance minister. Her resignation letter was published on her own account rather than released through the prime minister's office, which is part of why it landed as it did.

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