{"id":147530,"date":"2026-07-29T01:29:27","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T01:29:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/147530\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T01:29:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T01:29:27","slug":"freeland-calls-trump-bully-in-chief-in-scathing-rebuke-canada-must-fight-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/147530\/","title":{"rendered":"Freeland calls Trump ‘bully in chief’ in scathing rebuke: ‘Canada must fight back’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Referencing everything from South Park to Leonard Cohen poems, Chrystia Freeland has taken shots at Donald Trump in the pages of the New York Times<\/a> this week. She even doles out the “b” word \u2014 bully \u2014 twice.<\/p>\n

A former MP and deputy prime minister under Justin Trudeau, Freeland\u00a0resigned her seat in Parliament<\/a> in January, and this month\u00a0took up a position as warden of Rhodes House<\/a> and chief executive officer of the Rhodes Trust, a British educational charity that supports global graduate students at the University of Oxford. But she has not fully left the political realm, writing regularly on\u00a0“the intersection of economics and geopolitics” in Bloomberg News<\/a> and appearing as a panelist on Wall Street Week.<\/p>\n

Her latest piece appeared Tuesday as a guest essay in the oped pages of the New York Times, under the title “You Aren’t Going to Like What Comes After America.” The words, which also close her essay, are from a poem by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, written in 2003<\/a> and most recently published posthumously in 2018.<\/p>\n

In the essay, Freeland takes aim at Trump’s “Blame Canada<\/a>” tactics, a reference to a song in the 1999 South Park movie (spun off from the TV show) in which the mother of one of the characters rallies other parents against Canada for producing a raunchy film that she claims has corrupted their children.<\/p>\n

Freeland noted that the plot point is meant to be satirical humour and decried its move into the real world, saying it was “meant to underscore the pathetic human tendency to point fingers at someone \u2014 anyone \u2014 else for our own failings.”<\/p>\n

\"Chrystia<\/p>\n

Chrystia Freeland delivers remarks during an event at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n

She says Trump’s latest tariffs against Canadian goods \u2014 a list that includes<\/a> wine, hockey sticks and cement \u2014 are under the pretext of unfair Canadian treatment of U.S. alcohol, dairy and automobiles.<\/p>\n

“That’s just the most recent rationale,” she adds. “Earlier in July, Canada’s cited crime was being ravaged by the dangerous fires in our own boreal forest. Before that, Canada was considered a national security threat, and therefore subject to tariffs on our steel, aluminum, car parts and cars.”<\/p>\n

Freeland goes on to claim that “the economics of Mr. Trump’s tariff attacks on Canada are not really the point,” and concludes: “Trump’s tariff offensive has a clear purpose: to demonstrate who is dominant and who must submit.” She adds: “Canada must fight back. The only thing a bully understands is strength.”<\/p>\n

Near the end of the piece she refers to Trump as “the current bully in chief.”<\/p>\n

Freeland’s salvo is just the latest in a series of exchanges between her and Trump that go back to at least 2018<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That September, Trump said he had snubbed a request from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for a one-on-one meeting because, among other reasons, he didn’t like Canada’s negotiation tactics and “we don’t like their representative very much.” Freeland was Canada’s top trade representative at the time.<\/p>\n

Later, when Freeland resigned as finance minister in 2024, Trump posted that her “behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals which are good for the very unhappy citizens of Canada,” adding: “She will not be missed!!!”<\/p>\n

The next year, with Freeland vying for leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, Trump called her “a whack” and claimed credit for her resignation as finance minister.<\/p>\n

“Governor Trudeau understood that,” he told Britain’s Spectator magazine in an interview<\/a>, using his nickname for the prime minister. “And he actually fired her because of a meeting he had with me. I said, ‘She is so bad. She’s bad for the country.'”<\/p>\n

Freeland shot back on social media, saying that his insults were because “I don’t back down \u2026 I’m ready to fight for Canada\u2014and win.”<\/p>\n

Freeland is also at work on a book about her time in politics, titled “Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider’s View of Dealing with a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats, and Other Complicated People.” It is scheduled for release on Oct. 13 by Simon & Schuster Canada.<\/p>\n

The book is described by the publisher<\/a> as “part memoir, part polemic,” and “a powerful investigation of leadership, ambition, compromise, and betrayal, from a public intellectual with a clear view into the dangers, and opportunities, of our unreliable relationship with the United States.”<\/p>\n

The title is a reference to a comment she made on Real Time With Bill Maher in February, saying that the U.S. is “not a very reliable boyfriend right now.”<\/p>\n

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com<\/a> and sign up for our newsletters here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Referencing everything from South Park to Leonard Cohen poems, Chrystia Freeland has taken shots at Donald Trump in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147531,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[47906,17,1061,47908,162,127,41246,12870,47907,13487],"class_list":["post-147530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-blame-canada","tag-canada","tag-chrystia-freeland","tag-deputy-prime-minister","tag-donald-trump","tag-justin-trudeau","tag-leonard-cohen","tag-minister-of-foreign-affairs","tag-rhodes-house","tag-trade-representative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}