Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's administration is in "maximum chaos" as one of his most trusted allies, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, essentially bailed on him and put his political future into question, Bloomberg News reported in an interview with Brian Platt, the agency's reporter in Ottawa.
It's already a volatile moment for Trudeau with the changing of U.S. leadership and a public dispute with incoming President Donald Trump, who threatened him over tariffs, flippantly suggested Canada should become a U.S. state and led to Trudeau even considering resignation himself.
"Everyone I’ve talked to in Ottawa is baffled by how Trudeau handled this," said Platt. "It seems he effectively fired his finance minister on Friday, and offered to move her to a vague role of managing Canada-US relations. Astoundingly, he kept her in place as finance minister to deliver a budget update on Monday. Clearly he never expected she would turn on him so fiercely."
It's a massive blow to Trudeau's administration, he continued, because "Freeland was by far the most important minister in Trudeau’s government. She was more than a finance minister. She was also the deputy prime minister and almost every sensitive file ran through her office, especially on the world stage: Ukraine relations, China tariffs, and a strategy for dealing with Donald Trump."
Moreover, she explicitly timed her move to do damage to him, he said. Rather than announce over the weekend, "she waited until minutes before the lockup for her economic statement was set to begin, creating maximum chaos. And she implied that Trudeau is more focused on 'political gimmicks' than on protecting the country from Trump’s tariff threats."
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All of this comes at a time when Trudeau's Liberal Party is facing rock-bottom approval numbers and a threat of massive losses in Canadian federal elections — despite Canada's election system infamously being biased in favor of the ruling party.
"The Liberal Party is in shock. From what I can tell, this caught Trudeau’s office completely by surprise, so imagine how everyone else received it. The rest of Trudeau’s cabinet has largely kept quiet as they process the news. Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives want an election as soon as possible, so they are eating this up," wrote Platt.
Indeed, Trudeau might not even survive long enough to lose the next federal election. "The biggest question right now is whether Trudeau can hang on as Liberal leader."