Do we like Chrystia Freeland?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful in her own words turned up, and she has a long record of public service, but she has one ethics finding and one messy exit from Parliament.
Freeland is Alberta-born, studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar from 1991, and spent years as a journalist before politics, including a stint as deputy editor of The Globe and Mail. She then spent about 12 years in federal politics, rising to finance minister and deputy prime minister. In 2026 she went full circle and took over the Rhodes Trust at Oxford.
The big political moment was December 2024, when she quit Justin Trudeau's cabinet and said resigning was “the only honest and viable path”. Her new book goes further: she says she probably left “a year, or maybe two years, too late”. She also writes that “history will be kind to” Trudeau, but there's more criticism than praise in there.
The most recent stoush was January 2026, when she took an unpaid economic adviser job with Ukraine's president while still an MP. Conservatives and the NDP said she should have resigned first. She said she'd consulted the federal ethics commissioner throughout, and she left her seat on 9 January.
Then in February the Commissioner of Canada Elections found she had unintentionally broken the Elections Act by answering questions about a 2024 byelection at two government press conferences. It was valued at $910.58 and her riding association paid it back. She signed an undertaking not to repeat it, and the report noted she had no prior history of non-compliance.
On the good side, she took the Ukraine adviser role unpaid, and the Rhodes Trust chair has called her an “outstanding leader” as she took on the Oxford job. She's no saint, but a technical breach and some clumsy timing sit well short of a pattern of mistreating people. Would we support her? Yes.