Chrystia Freeland

She was finance minister while everything got unaffordable for regular Canadians. My groceries cost double what they did five years ago. Gas was brutal. Mortgage rates shot up and crushed people who had done everything right. And the whole time the government kept spending like nothing was wrong. At some point you have to own the results. This was her file and the results hurt millions of families.

Chrystia Freeland served as Finance Minister during some of the most punishing inflation Canada has seen in a generation. Yes there were global factors but the response was slow, the spending never stopped, and ordinary Canadians went from worrying about COVID to worrying about their mortgage. That is a failure of economic leadership. Canadians needed someone fighting hard to keep costs down — we didn't get that. She needs to own that record.

Chrystia Freeland served as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance from 2019 to December 2024. On her watch, the federal government ran the largest peacetime deficits in Canadian history. While pandemic emergency spending in 2020 was defensible, the spending continued well beyond the emergency — and Canadians are still paying for it. During her tenure as Finance Minister, Canada's national debt rose by hundreds of billions of dollars. The "fiscal anchors" she repeatedly announced were quietly moved or abandoned when they became inconvenient. Inflation reached 40-year highs in 2022, driven in significant part by the scale of federal spending she championed. The cost of living crisis — housing, groceries, interest rates — deepened under budgets she presented and defended. Housing affordability, a file she was supposed to be leading on, got dramatically worse each year she held the portfolio. Her December 2024 resignation — a public letter criticizing Trudeau on the eve of a fall economic statement — was treated by some as a principled act. A less charitable reading is that she spent five years enabling the spending approach she suddenly found objectionable only when her own leadership ambitions diverged from the Prime Minister's. She lost the Liberal leadership race to Mark Carney, won her seat back in 2025, and now sits as an MP while Canadians contend with the fiscal legacy she helped build. The resignation letter cannot retroactively rehabilitate five years of fiscal drift. Canadians deserve a Finance Minister who holds the line throughout their mandate — not just on the way out. Reviewed as a Canadian who believes the Finance Minister is accountable for what happens to the cost of living on their watch — and who watched it get worse every year Freeland held that responsibility.