Chrystia Freeland chooses Ukraine

Remember this minicontroversy? https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/freeland-nationalist-scarf-1.6372995

There’s a grammatical issue in the headline of this piece. It’s in the present tense, though since Chrystia Freeland burst onto the federal politics scene, she has been consistently choosing Ukraine. I should have written Chrystia Freeland Always Chooses Ukraine but good headlines are supposed to be current. Yesterday, the choice was made official.

Freeland announced that she would finally resign her seat, hours after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Freeland would be a his special economic advisor — something that he pitched to her on Dec. 22 while she was visiting Ukraine. This wasn’t mentioned in Mark Carney’s Dec. 27 announcement about his meeting with Zelensky at the Halifax Airport, as Zelensky was flying to meet with Donald Trump in Florida.

(She isn’t resigning effective immediately though, she’s going to collect a few more days of salary, and will resign sometime soon).

This appointment isn’t a surprise. Indeed, she had already also taken a job in England that was supposed to start on July 1, administrating the Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University. But the order of operations is all off. She accepted the Oxford job while still elected. She’s been doing economic booster speeches for Ukraine while still elected. And Freelend only resigned after Zelensky made the announcement. While we all know how much she loves Ukrainians, we can pretty clearly see how little she thinks of Canadians.

As a Member of Parliament, Freeland played an outsized role in managing Canada’s relationship with Ukraine. She’s Ukrainian whose family roots reach deep into Nazi Ukraine (which is fascinating, given the enormous toll that Nazi violence took on Ukrainians — a significant number of the Soviet Union’s 26.6 million to 42.7 million war dead were Ukrainian, including 1.5 million Jews). Her personal hero grandfather was a journalist who edited a newspaper that had been seized from Jewish owners to become a propaganda outlet for the Nazis.

Thanks in no small part to her advocacy, Canadians have committed $23.5 billion to Ukraine between 2022 and last week — and that doesn’t include the money that we sent prior to Russia’s invasion, like financing electoral reform and national democratic institutions, and promoting women’s participation in Ukrainian elections. (That money was committed just before the last time Ukraine held general elections, in 2019, when Zelensky was elected).

Nor does it include all the money spent to offer residence to nearly a million Ukrainians to ride the war out, or to settle here permanently, with no general plan about how to absorb such a rapid increase in Canada’s population.

It’s trite to say, but $23.5 billion is a lot of money. It’s an insane amount of money. It’s the kind of money that could launch a publicly-owned and coordinated EV battery industry in Canada. It could provide free higher education all students. It could give all artists, defined broadly, a living wage. It could have given disabled people the means to live dignified and well, rather than the paltry sum that Freeland ended up offering — a sum so low that dozens of advocacy groups begged her to increase to save people’s lives. Hell, we could have done some or all of that and still had money left over to send to Ukraine. Instead, disabled people were offered MAID, also under her leadership as deputy prime minister.

She was the finance minister in the post-COVID-19 spending bonanza era that saw Canadians forced to give back money they needed and that government gave to them during the early days of the pandemic. She was the finance minister when the housing and food crises were forcing people into levels of poverty not really seen before in Canadian history. She oversaw the biggest increase between the rich and the poor in Canada.

And yet, $23.5 billion has been sent to Ukraine in the hopes that it can help them fend off Russia. It’s Freeland’s most expensive achievement.

Freeland has been rewarded for this achievement too. She was given an official appointment as “special envoy” to Ukraine, so that Canada could pay for trips to Kyiv her to check in on her apartment there. She has spent infinitely more time advocating for the people of Ukraine than she has advocating for the people of her own riding.

Canada will never have an accounting of how this money is being spent, how much of it has actually gone into corruption and how much of it has gone to kill Russians. There will never be any accountability to be had over the fact that Freeland turned Canada into such a close ally of Ukraine, that we could never play a mediator role to try and bring a diplomatic end to this horrific loss of life, even though it was always only going to end through diplomacy. And Freeland will never have to face the fact that she, above pretty much any other Canadian politician, is responsible for making Canada an enthusiastic cheerleader for this nightmare that has obliterated generations of young men in both countries.

Since Russia’s invasion, Ukraine estimates that 420,000 Russians have been killed or injured — which, I guess we’re supposed to feel good that maybe some of our taxes paid to maim or murder some of these guys. Ukrainian officials laugh at this, saying that the death count only helped to secure 0.8% of Ukraine’s territory (if it’s so minor, was it worth sacrificing so much to keep?). A Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated seven months ago that Ukraine’s casualties are also north of 400,000 people, which, unlike for the dead Russians, we are supposed to feel bad about, and maybe move us to send them even more money to stop any more deaths.

Just don’t look at a map to see just how much territory Russia has taken since 2022.

All the while, Canada’s engagement in Ukraine has juiced public opinion over three years, to say that war is good, actually, it can be the answer — and that the real threat to Canadians is Russians. Therefore, Canada needs to triple its military spending. We must prepare for our own war against Russia. Freeland set up the pins for Mark Carney to elbow them all down.

It would have been so interesting to see how Canada could have engaged with Ukraine, had our position not been lead by a Ukrainian sycophant who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about war casualties. Would someone else had been more tempered and strategic about the support? Given our strategic location, could Canada have played a positive role brokering a deal that would have brought Russia and the United States closer to each other? Would we still be at a place where there is seemingly endless money to throw towards Zelensky? The impact that Freeland’s incessant insistance that Ukraine’s honour must be defended to the death, and that the survival of Western Democracy passes through murdering Russians in Ukraine meant that Canadians only heard one dominant message — there was never any space for anything other than ‘Russia bad, must kill.’

We obviously will never know the answer to any of these questions. But now, Zelensky has the woman responsible for so much support by his side (VOLUNTEERING as she made clear in her statement) who cemented Canada to his side, no matter what.

There’s no greater reward in Canada for the dangerously mediocre than falling up. There is no greater success for the descendants of European fascism than to help lead a country into their own foreign wars in the name of democracy and justice. Freeland has managed to come out firmly on top, with new roles and salaries and volunteer positions that will help her continue in the choir of death. As she now formally serves the economic interests of Ukraine (“As we move from fighting the war to fighting the peace, I think we really have to see this as an opportunity for an economic renaissance,” she said in a speech in early December), Canadians should be asking themselves if we we’ve been played by this woman — someone who, above all else, served a foreign country’s interests with our money and her office.