Chrystia Freeland announced Friday she will run to become the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Freeland, once a staunch ally of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, announced her intentions in a short post on social media.
“I’m running to fight for Canada,” she said in a statement issued “regarding the Liberal Party leadership campaign.”
Her official campaign launch will be Sunday.
Freeland becomes one of the highest-profile candidates in the leadership contest, joining contenders including former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney.
At least 10 Liberal MPs had already endorsed Freeland’s leadership ambitions in the days before she officially announced a run. These include Health Minister Mark Holland and former Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault.
The Liberal Party will decide on its new leader on March 9.
Freeland threatens ‘dollar-for-dollar’ tariff battle
Freeland also published an op-ed in the Toronto Star on Friday that laid out her plans to tackle the looming threat of tariffs from United States president-elect Donald Trump, who is set to take office on Monday.
In recent weeks, Trump has floated the idea of making Canada the “51st state” amid threats of blanket tariffs up to 25 per cent on Canadian imports entering the U.S.
In the previous Trump administration, Freeland led the Canadian team in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, later the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA).
Freeland warned in the Star piece that, “we must take President Trump at his word” when it comes to threats of economic coercion.
Get daily National news
Get the day’s top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.
She said that if Trump does follow through and impose 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods, the “counterpunch must be dollar-for-dollar.”
“Florida orange growers, Michigan dishwasher manufacturers and Wisconsin dairy farmers: brace yourselves. Canada is America’s largest export market — bigger than China, Japan, the U.K., and France combined,” Freeland wrote. “If pushed, our response will be the single largest trade blow the U.S. economy has ever endured.”
Freeland said that imposing dollar-for-dollar tariffs would generate some $150 billion in annual revenues for the Canadian government.
“If we are forced to retaliate, the $150 billion that Americans will pay to sell their goods to Canada is $150 billion we could use to help Canadians and businesses weather this essential fight. Just half of that revenue could provide nearly $2,700 in relief to every Canadian making less than $150,000 per year,” she wrote.
Tariffs are imposed by a government on goods entering a country and are paid by the importer, not the exporter. Some businesses may pass the extra cost of a tariff onto customers.
Freeland closed by focusing on shared value in Canada-U.S. trade relationship, noting that the Canadian supply of energy should be preferable to “relying on a petro-dictator.”
“That is why I am so confident that we will ultimately get a good deal. But we need to be prepared to fight for it,” she wrote.
Who is Chrystia Freeland?
Trudeau’s former deputy prime minister and finance minister, Freeland brings nearly a decade of political experience to the race.
It was Freeland’s resignation from the Liberal cabinet in late December — on the day she was meant to table the government’s fall economic statement — that precipitated a renewed surge of pressure in the prime minister’s leadership crisis.
She said in a letter to Trudeau that day that the prime minister had asked her to resign a few days earlier after the pair found themselves “at odds” about the direction of the country’s finances.
Freeland lambasted what she called “costly political gimmicks” and stressed the need for Ottawa to keep its “fiscal powder dry” ahead of Trump’s second presidential term in the United States.
Before that blow-up, Freeland had been Trudeau’s finance minister for four years. She served in the prime minister’s cabinet since she was first elected as the member of Parliament for the riding of University—Rosedale in 2015.
After announcing his resignation last Monday, Trudeau called Freeland “an incredible political partner” over the past decade. He said he had hoped she would stay on as the deputy prime minister to tackle “one of the most important files” for Canada, in apparent reference to the trade threats of the looming Trump presidency, “but she chose otherwise.”
Freeland’s portfolios in the Trudeau government have included handling international trade, foreign affairs and intergovernmental affairs. She has also played a significant role in Canada’s response to Russia’s war in Ukraine; her mother is Ukrainian and Freeland, fully fluent in the language, studied in Kyiv.
Before entering politics, Freeland worked for two decades as a journalist.
Carney, who announced his intentions to enter politics and seek the Liberal leadership on Thursday, was long rumoured in Ottawa as a possible successor for Freeland’s post as finance minister, though that never came to fruition.
In the midst of such speculation, Freeland revealed last year that Carney is the godfather to her son.
© 2025 Motorcycle accident toronto today, Toronto Car Accident News.