Chrystia Freeland Resigns from Trudeau Government, Plunging Canada into Political Crisis

Justin Trudeau’s prime ministership and his Liberal government hang by a thread after his Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, resigned from the cabinet Monday morning in a manner calculated to inflict maximum political damage.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government is on the brink of collapse after his Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland abruptly resigned from the cabinet on Monday morning in a move designed to inflict maximum political damage.

Freeland, who was set to deliver the government's fall economic update, which is akin to a mini-budget, on Monday afternoon, instead released a public resignation letter attacking Trudeau for engaging in "costly political gimmicks"—a reference to token measures to help ordinary Canadians cope with soaring prices—rather than deeper austerity in preparation for a potential trade war with a Trump-led America.

"The incoming administration in the US," declared Freeland, "is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25 percent tariffs.

"We need to take that threat extremely seriously. That means keeping our fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war …

"That means," she continued, "pushing back against ‘America First’ economic nationalism with a determined effort to fight for capital and investment and the jobs they bring."

As Freeland's now forsaken political titles suggest, she has been considered Trudeau's most important minister for most of his nine years in office. In addition to leading the Canadian effort to renegotiate the terms of NAFTA, the US-led North American trade bloc, during Trump's first term, Freeland has been the government's leading Ukraine war hawk. For that reason, she was once championed by Washington as a potential NATO Secretary-General. Freeland, whose grandfather was a prominent far-right Ukrainian nationalist Nazi collaborator, has a lifelong association with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, which has served as a key link between Ottawa and the political descendants of Stepan Bandera and other Nazi collaborators, who infest Ukraine's US-NATO proxy government and military apparatus.

In recent weeks there have been press reports of growing policy differences between Freeland and Trudeau. It was also public knowledge that Trudeau was seeking to persuade Mark Carney to enter the government and assume the Finance Ministry, in a desperate bid to shore up big business support for his government. Carney is a former head of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England and currently is the chair of the board of directors of both Bloomberg and Brookfield Asset Management.

In the wake of Freeland's resignation, there have been widespread calls from within Liberal ranks for Trudeau to resign, with the number of Liberals MPs ready to publicly urge Trudeau to quit rapidly swelling. When Freeland entered an emergency Liberal caucus meeting Monday evening, she was reportedly greeted with a standing ovation.

Polls show that were an election to be held today, the official opposition Conservatives would sweep to power, with the Liberals reduced to a tiny rump of MPs. Under Pierre Poilievre, who staked his claim for leadership on being the most strident parliamentary supporter of the fascist-instigated "Freedom Convoy," the Conservatives are rapidly morphing into a far-right party.

The leaders of all three officially recognized opposition parties in parliament called on Trudeau to resign after Freeland quit the government Monday. But tellingly Jagmeet Singh, the head of the trade union sponsored New Democratic Party (NDP), refused to commit his party to bringing down the minority Liberal government, merely blustering, as he has in the past, that “all options are on the table.”

Union-NDP-Liberal alliance and suppression of the class struggle

Monday's events in Ottawa unfolded as the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) enforced an edict, issued by the government via the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB), criminalizing a strike by 55,000 Canada Post workers after 32 days.

Among the postal workers there was strong support for defying the back-to-work order, which is the third time in four months that the Trudeau government has criminalized worker job action based on a cooked-up, patently illegal “reinterpretation” of Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code.

Moreover, with the government discredited and widely hated, and the postal workers fighting for the defence of public services and the right to strike and other issues of vital concern for all workers, objective conditions for rallying the working class behind the postal workers could hardly have been more favourable. That is precisely why the CUPW, egged on by the Canadian Labour Congress and the entire trade union bureaucracy, ordered the postal workers to surrender and corralled them back on the job.

Since 2019, the NDP, at the unions’ urging, has propped up the minority Liberal government in parliament, as it lurched ever further right. This includes presiding over a murderous profits-before-lives response to the COVID-19 pandemic; massively increasing military spending; backing the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and integrating Canada ever more fully into the US-NATO war with Russia and Washington’s military-strategic offensive against China; and enforcing increased worker exploitation through inflation-driven real wage cuts and