On Nov. 3, 2022, finance minister Chrystia Freeland rose in the House of Commons to deliver that year’s fall economic statement., the country needed “a government with a real, robust industrial policy; a government committed to investing in the net-zero transition, to bringing in new private investment, and to helping create good paying jobs from coast-to-coast-to-coast.
The first takeaway is Ms. Freeland’s refreshing use of Canada’s history as a source of inspiration and not, as is the norm for thegovernment, fodder for an apology. However, after invoking Laurier to serve, she switched to her government’s usual approach to the past: condemnation. “That project, like Laurier himself, was imperfect. The prosperity and opportunity it brought were not shared equally – with Indigenous Peoples, with women, with new Canadians.
From the election of the Trudeau government in 2015 until her abrupt exit from cabinet last Monday, Chrystia Freeland was one of the most prominent members of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s team. In recent years, she was clearly the most prominent. So what will be Ms. Freeland’s legacy as finance minister – the cabinet member in charge of fiscal and economic policy?
On paper, her prepolitics bio resembles that of Michael Ignatieff, yet she has never been tagged with his “just visiting” label. She has a talent for making people feel like she’s one of them and on their side, even as she stands out from the crowd. She also has a talent for figuring out who in the crowd are the right people to know, and showing the chutzpah to insist they get to know her., she met Mr. Trudeau, then a leadership aspirant in the moribund Liberal Party.
She announced some of these programs in the fall of 2022, and more came later: Longer mortgage amortizations; allowing more borrowing from a buyer’s RRSP; government loans for downpayments ; and the First Home Savings Account, an unprecedented tax shelter for future buyers. But the main fiscal guardrail – keeping the deficit low enough to maintain the debt-to-GDP ratio on a stable or downward path – has held. Though last year’s deficit clocked in at $61.9-billion, more than 50 per cent above budget, nominal economic growth was sufficient to keep the debt-to-GDP ratio from rising. If Ms. Freeland were in charge of the finances of Britain or the U.S., with their far larger deficits, she’d be seen as a relative avatar of fiscal probity.
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