Freeland calls Trump 'bully in chief' in scathing rebuke: 'Canada must fight back'

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 this week. She even doles out the “b” word — bully — twice.

A former MP and deputy prime minister under Justin Trudeau, Freeland resigned her seat in Parliament in January, and this month took up a position as warden of Rhodes House 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 “the intersection of economics and geopolitics” in Bloomberg News and appearing as a panelist on Wall Street Week.

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 and most recently published posthumously in 2018.

In the essay, Freeland takes aim at Trump’s “Blame Canada” 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.

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 — anyone — else for our own failings.”

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

“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.”

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.”

Near the end of the piece she refers to Trump as “the current bully in chief.”

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

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.

‘She will not be missed’: Trump trolls Canadian Finance Minister Freeland’s resignation or ‘firing’ by ‘Governor Justin Trudeau’ pic.twitter.com/Uo2vPRAH77

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!!!”

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.

“Governor Trudeau understood that,” he told Britain’s Spectator magazine in an interview, 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.'”

There’s a reason Trump called me a “whack.” There’s a reason he complained about my negotiating skills. There’s a reason Putin kicked me out of Russia, too. I don’t back down—and Trump and Putin know it.I’m ready to fight for Canada—and win.