The Ben Mulroney Show - Ben discusses Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland's Explosive Resignation

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

Minister Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland's Explosive Resignation Guest: Anthony Koch, Managing Principal at AK Strategies and former National Campaign Spokesperson for Pierre Poilievre Guest: Warren Kinsella, Former Special Advisor to Jean Chretien and CEO of the Daisy Group Guest: Paul Wells, Canadian journalist and pundit If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy

Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. The biggest news of the day happened at 9.07 when Chrystia Freeland tweeted her resignation letter that she sent to the Prime Minister on the day that she was slated to give the fall economic update in the House of Commons. This is a huge deal. And rather than go through it with you alone, I am coming to at you with an expert, Anthony Koch, managing principal at AK Strategies and former national campaign spokesperson for Pierre Poliev. Anthony, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Okay. I mean, I did not see this coming, first of all. Were you surprised?

Absolutely shocked. And I think anybody other than maybe Christian Friedman's personal inner circle would be very much telling you the same. This is historically unprecedented. It's not just the fact that she resigned. It's the style and manner in which she did. She was supposed to give a fall economic statement update within hours and drops it like this. Yeah, this is insane. She's firing across Justin Trudeau's bow here.

She is throwing down the gauntlet. And it feels to me, and we're going to drill down in a second, but it feels to me that this letter is essentially telegraphing to the people of Canada that whatever is in that fall economic statement, Justin Trudeau has to own it. 100%. So let's go through it.

Starts very nice. It was an honor of my life, but I can no longer serve as your finance minister. And you offered me another position in your cabinet. So she's saying you asked me to resign on Friday. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

That's the funny thing, right? It seems very much like he wanted her to eat this hot potato garbage fall economic statement. And then once she's done her usefulness, all right, we'll shuffle you over here so that I can probably bring it. Everybody's assuming it's Mark Carney. I can bring in my buddy Mark Carney afterwards. Thanks so much for everything you've done for me. You know, Ms. Freeland, for all of her many flaws, and I've been chief among them in terms of pointing them out, she's been very loyal to the prime minister and she's taken a lot of bullets on his behalf. I think this was just one far too many, and it goes to speak to a long list now

of people who've been thrown under the bus by this Prime Minister. But the most important part of the letter, I think, is that she makes it very clear that she's staying in caucus and that she intends to run again as a Liberal. If you want to kick me out, I'm telling you I'm sticking around. If I'm not here in the next coming

weeks, it's because the Prime Minister kicked me out. Yeah, there's no room for interpretation. It's very clear. I think this is a de facto declaration of war and i think this is the de facto beginning of the liberal leadership race for who succeeds justin trudeau well i don't know yeah i don't think he's going to be resigning anytime soon but i think this will be the beginning of a series of events that will force a couple of very difficult conversations i mean look when she says she says we found ourselves at odds and then she positions, she then puts her position forward, which means the opposite of her position would be Justin's position. That's what we're supposed to infer.

The fact that she says we need to take this threat extremely seriously of the 25 percent tariff threat by Donald Trump. That means keeping our fiscal powder dry today so we have the reserves that we may need. And she says, that means eschewing costly political gimmicks which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment. So she's saying,

I mean, that's a devastating attack on him. No doubt about it. And I think it's funny because we saw just yesterday, the news came up the 250 freebie that the government was supposed to be giving everybody has now been rescinded yeah so i think it's very clear when we're talking about political gimmicks that's what we're probably talking about here yeah oh yeah miss freeland realizes we're on the gst holiday

all that nonsense all these things right that most people are not actually going to be using and small retailers don't have the ability to effectively apply for. So everybody's going to be keeping their receipts now to apply to the CRA. It's ridiculous, right? Yeah. And if the numbers from Brian Lilly,

it looks like they're accurate so far. We're going to have a deficit of just short of $62 billion. We don't have the fiscal capacity to be doing these freebies anymore. You know, once upon a time, this prime minister loved to talk about the unique fiscal capacity that Canada had back in 2015. In large part, thanks to the fiscal stewardship of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The world could not be more different today, financially or otherwise, from the one that we inherited in 2015.

So it's enough of this. So, Anthony, who's going to give this fall economic statement, if not the minister? Well, that's the thing. You're seeing right now the Conservative caucus is having a field day on this, quote-tweeting the tweet with the letter from Ms. Freeland saying, who is going to give the fall economic statement? Because we don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if the prime minister's office is scrambling right now trying to figure out what they're going to do to salvage this.

Because if you wanted to plan the ultimate way to slap your incumbent prime minister in the face, you would be hard pressed to find any way you could do that. That would be more severe and more aggressive than what Miss Freeland just did today. This is a full five star frontal assault. Yeah. And, you know, Anthony, a lot of people over the past few months have we've been talking about Justin Trudeau. And is he going to stay? Is he going to leave? So there's this general consensus out there. It's like he can stay as long as he wants because he doesn't owe anybody anything. He took the party from third place to first place.

And because of that, he gets to call the shots as to when he leaves. And I know that technically from a procedural standpoint, that's true. But I think what we're seeing here is we're seeing that it's not on a personality level. It's absolutely not true. As you said, people like Chrystia Freeland have taken bullets for him over years and years at her at great risk to her reputation. She has taken ownership over things that she might not have necessarily agreed with because that's what her his office wanted. And we are now seeing those chickens come home to roost. Yeah, 150 percent. And I think this is what it comes down to. Does Justin Trudeau still have the moral authority to govern and be prime minister and

does he even have the moral authority to remain leader of the Liberal Party of Canada? Right. Yeah. A few months ago, we had grumblings and that magic letter that nobody wanted to publicize. Nobody wanted to put their name to asking for him to resign. But by all accounts, that was primarily sort of backbench ruffling. This is the deputy prime minister and minister of finance a few hours before she's supposed to deliver one of the most important and consequential updates and, you know, in a government economic statement, right? So this is very different.

And are we in a situation now where he might accelerate the integration of Mark Carney into this government? And if so, by what mechanism? How is he going to, let's assume for a second that he's going to pull the trigger right now.

Mark Carney is going to come in and read this thing, which I doubt, but let's say that was the plan. He doesn't have a seat in the House of Commons. How's that going to happen? No, not only that, if I'm Mark Carney, and I even

had an inkling of potentially taking this job, I watched this this morning, and I'm running so fast. You know what? That's a good point. I'm going, okay, you know what, Justin? Maybe I was interested in this, but the way you guys made it sound to me, Ms. Freeland was going to be okay with it.

Now, given the context, it was already, I don't understand. This man is supposedly by everybody said to be this brilliant figure. You know, he's had a very successful career. So there's probably some validity to that. But this is probably the worst possible time to start a Canadian political career, the way he's trying to do it. With the news of today, I think people in his inner circle have to be saying, Hey buddy, maybe park yourself, slam the brakes a little bit, give it a few months. This guy's on the way out. Maybe we revisit it after, but to come in now this way after this happens would be catastrophic

and it would be ending your career before it even starts. Have you, I mean, listen, a few months ago, I would have said Justin Trudeau is having the worst, the worst month I've ever seen. And then another month goes by and I say it again and they keep finding a new a new basement. They find a trap door that leads even lower is I don't think I've seen a government this paralyzed by its own self-inflicted wounds in a very long time. No, I think it's Chris Selle who just tweeted this out. It was funny, but it's government by improv. These guys are winging it by the skin of their teeth, doing nonsense. Let's throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

I think this is what's going on. And Ms. Freeland is now validating the narrative that the conservatives have been pushing for the better part of the last decade, quite frankly, but especially in the last year and a half, which is this is an unserious prime minister who fails to recognize the severity of the situation that Canadians face vis-a-vis the United States and the world. And that instead of focusing on trying to come up with a strategy to effectively stand up for Canadians and for Canada, he's trying to find anything and anything to stick something against the wall to try and reverse his horrific political fortunes that just seem to keep getting worse. We always said, oh, what's the liberal bottom? 25%, 20%, 17%. We'll see. But they may very well be on the way to a Kim Campbell-like performance in the subsequent election. And I think other people are starting to wise up to that. So I don't think he's going to be resigning anytime soon, but look for more calls for him to go.

Anthony Koch, thank you so much for being here. I hope to lean on you again for your insights because this is a moving target. We're going to need some help analyzing it. Absolutely. The news of the day is the finance minister and deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, has stepped down and resigned.

She sent her letter to the prime minister and it reads, I mean, it's a devastating read. To talk more about this is Warren Kinsella. Warren, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. My pleasure, my friend. Okay, so this letter, if you just read it, it's an excellent, it's a riveting read, but you're a master of of political communication read between the lines for us she's declared her candidacy for the liberal leadership like this letter ben is a rocket directly at justin trudeau's credibility and his claim to

being a feminist like listen to this she talks about the trump tariff she said we need to take that extremely seriously that means keeping our fiscal powder dry today i'm quoting her so we have the reserves we may need for coming tariff war that means is chewing costly political gimmicks yeah she's accusing the prime minister of canada of engaging in political gimmicks. She's accusing the Prime Minister of Canada of engaging in political gimmicks. She's running for the leadership. She's running for the leadership. But you sort of on Friday, on our political panel, you suggested that there was something coming. What did you know on Friday? Well, I knew that she had a book coming in February. I knew that she was going to leave, but I don't think I

or she even thought that she was going to leave this soon. I do know that she had been working the phones. She had been talking to people, important people. I think you can guess who about what she should do, because the prime minister's office, the office of the prime minister was leaking against the finance minister. And the one thing, you know, Martin and Cretia showed, and I worked for Cretia, full disclosure, you know, you don't have to love each other, but you have to work. There can't be any light between the minister of finance and the prime minister. And this prime minister, Justin Trudeau, basically broke with his own finance minister and started leaking against her.

And she just obviously said, this can't go on. I'm going to quit. Was the timing of this proof that she did not want to wear the disaster that was the fall economic statement? 100%, you know, because we had seen that leak in the past 24 hours, that she didn't want to go ahead with the $250 check to everybody or just about everybody. And I saw that as a sign that maybe she was going to stick around at that point because she'd won the fight with PMO. But obviously she fired off this letter in both official languages this morning and said, enough is enough. I can't trust this guy.

Basically, she said, I cannot trust the Prime Minister of Canada, but I'm going to stick around, and I'm going to be a visual reminder that nobody else should trust him either. But also points out, she says, I'm going to stick around, I'm going to run for my seat, which means if she's not running for that seat in the next election, it's because he put pressure on her to leave, to boot her from the party. Which is what he did to Jody Wilson-Raybould,

which is what he did to Jane Philpott. Like the history here of the Liberal Party, which I know a little bit about, you know, when John Turner was finance minister and he broke with Pierre Trudeau, he left to go join the law firm Macmillan Bench, where, full disclosure, I worked as well. But he was rusty, you know, he was away too long. And your dad beat him and clobbered him. When Paul Martin left, he did what Freeland is doing. He stuck around. He said, OK, I'm quitting as minister of finance or you fired me as minister of finance, but I'm going to stay put, which he did. And he became prime minister and he became prime minister for a lot longer than John Turner did. So I think she's learned from that experience, Freeland, and she's sticking around and saying, you're not want to join this government at this point?

And now, to me, it seems there's even less of an argument to join them now. Do you see it that way? Yeah, I sure do. As a matter of fact, I was saying to my colleagues at Daisy Group this morning, they told me I need to use this line with you. I said, so this isn't just Carney

jumping onto the deck of the Titanic. It's him jumping onto the deck of the Titanic when it's on fire and there's an outbreak of bubonic plague. It's like, he just should not do it. He's crazy if he does it. But obviously Trudeau on Friday said to Christopher Freeland, I want you out so I can bring this guy in.

And it's just so much going on. I think everybody's forgotten about poor old Mr. Fraser from Nova Scotia, the immigration minister, former immigration who quit this morning and nobody's even paying attention to it. Like this, Ben,

this is a government that's fallen apart. Have you been following this longer than me? Have you, I've, I've never seen a government so bereft of ideas, so listless and, and, and drifting around with no aims, no goals,

and so much of it is self-inflicted wounds. And just when I think they found the bottom, they find a trap door to go even deeper. Yeah. I mean, look at the GST cut, which started on the weekend. Like, you know, usually when you cut taxes, you get popular because of that, you know, maybe not a lot, but you get popular. They became less popular. They became more unpopular after bringing in a tax cut. There's nothing that they're doing that is working. And this is God. Today is a day of absolute chaos for the Liberal Party of Canada. And it's got to send a message to cabinet and to caucus that the only solution is for Justin Trudeau to go.

Because the problem, if you look at all of these problems, they all come back to one guy. They come back to him. And this is a multifaceted problem. These are intersecting crises. We've got the looming crisis with our southern partners in the United States with the 25% tariffs. This notion of a united team Canada approach,

it's being stymied by the people who are supposed to be the leaders on the file, our prime minister and his team. And on top of that, you've got the whole fake feminism of it all. You put this all together in a blender and I don't see, I don't see how he's got the, I don't see how he's got the confidence of his team or the people to go sit and go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump. No, and your point that you've just made is exactly the point Freeland makes in her letter. She says, we have to work in good faith and humility with the premiers of the provinces and territories of our great and diverse country.

Boy, does that ever sound like a leadership candidate speech. The true Team Canada response. Like, this isn't just a letter of resignation. This is the beginning of a liberal leadership platform. Like, there's no doubt that is what she's going to do in my mind. And, like, she's looking pretty good this morning. She was wearing a lot of stuff that the Trudeau government had been doing. No longer. She's on the outside. And, you know, you and I have been talking about it for months. One of the big problems is there was nobody waiting in the wings.

No clear successor. Now there is one, Chrystia Freeland. Yeah, absolutely. Lastly, you know, for him to go, who's going to be putting the pressure on him? Because you had a few backbenchers who really didn't want to put their name on a document a few months ago. Do you think people will be further emboldened? Do you think that people have the courage to actually go out there publicly from within the liberal ranks and say, it's time for you to go, sir? Well, he, you know, there have been people in caucus in the summertime who try to do that.

So, you know, Katie Telford and PMO refused to let them meet. They refused to let them meet with Trudeau. The House of Commons has been shut down over, you know, the release of those documents. We've got to go. We've got to go, my friend. I apologize, but we'll talk soon. No problem. The biggest news of the day is that Chrystia Freeland, our Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, the first female Prime Minister in the history of our country, has resigned. She sent

a letter in the morning to the Prime Minister saying, I don't have your confidence. You asked me to resign. I don't have your confidence. I don't want another position in Cabinet. And then made a list of all the ways she diverges with this Prime Minister on a number of files.

And to talk more about it, I'm so pleased to welcome to the show for the very first time, Canadian journalist and pundit Paul Wells. You can catch him, his incredible, incisive writing on Substack. Paul, welcome to the Ben Mulroney Show. Hey, Ben, how are you? Well, this is exciting. I'm so glad to speak to people like you who know far more about this than I yesterday on sub stack. You, you, you, you were writing about, you know,

the, the, the, the, how things looked on Sunday night and you mused and you asked yourself, maybe it's not Justin Trudeau playing a Christy Freeland. Maybe it's Christy Freeland who's playing Justin Trudeau. And it does seem like she got the better of them in this moment it sure does uh so i was just watching netflix last night and then this amazing uh piece from john ivison in the national post came out saying that they were going to dump the 250 checks for everybody in Canada making under $150,000, which is an astonishing move. And I thought, well, where the hell did that come from?

And then I remembered the Globe story, Bob Fyfe and Marika Walsh in the Globe last week, saying that there was tension between Trudeau and his finance minister, and that he had Mark Carney on call waiting. And, of course, everyone in Ottawa read that as a repeat of 2020 when Trudeau set up Bill Morneau, had his office leak unflattering stories about Bill Morneau, and then accepted Morneau's resignation, essentially fired his finance minister. And that's how Christopher Freeland became finance minister. Everyone thought, well, you know, the son of a gun is doing it again.

But to me, the dropping of the last minute dropping of the $250 checks was a tell. And in the original Globe and Mail piece, what we were reading was that Freeland didn't want to be hosing money around right now, and Trudeau did. So to me, that looked like Trudeau blinking. And this letter confirms that. The way she lays it out is quite devastating by saying that there's a schism between the two of them. And then she lays out all the things she disagrees with, calling these things a gimp, political gimmicks, costly political gimmicks. We've got to keep our fiscal powder dry today. So we have reserves.

Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment. She's telling Canadians, these are the things your prime minister believes in. Yeah. The gimmick thing is absolutely devastating. You know what I was thinking as I read it was, it's a very British resignation letter. And this is someone who worked in London for the Financial Times for years. And in Canada, of course, everyone's nicey-nicey. And I'm so grateful

for the opportunity. I want to spend more time with my family. And in Britain, they say, look, you're an idiot. And this was much more British in tone. Yeah. But she also, Paul, she also, she finishes it by saying, I look forward to continuing my work within the Liberal, as a Liberal member of Parliament, and I'm committed to running again for my seat in Toronto in the next federal election. Seems like a nice thing to say at the end, but what she's telling everybody reading it is, if I'm not here in the next election, you can blame Justin for kicking me out. Yeah. I mean, I've almost never seen more devastating timing.

Yeah. There's a mini budget today. I'm hearing rumors that they shut down the lockup where the reporters were supposed to see the financial statement. I mean, that'll become clearer as the day progresses. There's a by-election. People are voting now in a by-election in British Columbia, where the outcome was already very uncertain for the Liberal Party. And my God, the Liberal Party's Christmas party for big dollar donors is across the river in Gatineau tonight.

And the Prime Minister is going to be speaking. If he's still the Prime Minister, he's going to be speaking to the party's biggest donors tonight. What on earth is he going to say? So, Paul, let's take a beat and go back to that last sentence. If he's still prime minister. You know, a few months ago, when there was a summertime rebellion that was brewing, the common consensus that I was heard by the pundit class on television was, the prime minister is going to leave when he wants. It may be the right time, but if he doesn't want to leave, he doesn't have to leave because he doesn't owe anybody anything.

And because he took the party from third place to first place. And I appreciate that. But I read this letter, Paul, and I see that, yeah, he doesn't owe anyone anything from that point. But this is a woman who took some heavy fire on his behalf. And so you can see that maybe the calculus has changed a little bit. What's it going to take for the people who quietly protested to come out publicly to demand, hey, guy, it's time for you to go? Well, I expect that one of the things we're going to see over the course of the day is whether there's any appetite to. Well, you know how how the forces line up on each side. Yeah. The, you know,

an American president always has a staffer walking around behind them, carrying the nuclear football, you know, uh, Christopher Freeland has spent the last four years walking around behind the prime minister carrying his credibility. Yeah. And,

uh, she was the only person who, uh, who knew the codes. And, uh, she just, she just, she just put in both locks, both keys and turned them. Um,

like I literally, literally no one else. If Anita Anand had quit cabinet, that would have been, uh, like a, uh, a big story for the day, but nothing, nothing like this. And Paul, one of the Mark Carney of it all? This is a man, a lot of us were scratching our heads saying, ship's sinking. Why are you jumping on board? And what's he thinking after this,

this dumpster fire within a dumpster fire? I, I don't know. I understand politicians who keep quiet and keep their counsel while a lot is going on. But it feels to me like if Carney doesn't say something in the next day about his intentions and his read of the situation, that he's showing himself yet again as an empty suit. I really think this imposes an obligation on a major player in this drama who may have volunteered or he may have been drafted, I don't know, to say, look, either to move against the prime minister or to say he's not interested.

Because he keeps getting, he keeps filling up in these globe stories. Meanwhile, Jody Wilson-Raybould, who's been on the receiving end of the prime minister's ire herself, wrote in response to Chrystia Freeland's letter, she said, when the general is losing his most loyal soldiers on the eve of a tariff war, the country desperately needs a new general. And so she, listen, she's on the outside so she

can say these things loudly, but what I don't understand, Paul, is you've got I don't know why there aren't louder voices within the liberal caucus. It's not like things are rosy. It's not like they're riding a wave of popularity. A lot of them are going to lose their jobs regardless.

Why wouldn't they go down honorably or go down in the hopes of, of, of, I mean, if they feel it in their hearts that he should leave, why don't they say it? Almost every team puts up its highest value on loyalty.

Not even because loyalty feels best or, but it, it, it, it simply usually works better than disloyalty. Like whatever else is going on, you don't make it better by circling the wagon and shooting in word. But what more and more liberals have come to understand is that that's what Trudeau and his chief of staff, Katie Telford, tell them, and then he plays them,

and then he discards them when it's convenient for him. Yeah. When Morneau was fired, the first thing I wrote was, what this proves is that it's impossible to be loyal enough for this gang. Yeah. Well, we're going to have to leave it there, Paul.

Thank you so much for adding your voice to this, uh, ever changing a conversation. I hope you come back to the Ben Mulroney show soon. You got it. Thanks again.