Chrystia Freeland

Christina Alexandra Freeland PC MP is a Canadian journalist and politician. She has served as the tenth deputy prime minister of Canada since 2019 and as the minister of finance since 2020. She was elected to the House of Commons in 2013 and following the 2015 election was appointed to the Cabinet by newly elected prime minister Justin Trudeau. She is the author of Sale of the Century, a 2000 book about Russia’s journey from Communist state rule to capitalism.

About Chrystia Freeland in brief

Summary Chrystia FreelandChristina Alexandra Freeland PC MP is a Canadian journalist and politician. She has served as the tenth deputy prime minister of Canada since 2019 and as the minister of finance since 2020. Freeland has held a number of portfolios over her tenure in government including as minister of intergovernmental affairs, minister of foreign affairs, and minister of international trade. She was elected to the House of Commons in 2013 and following the 2015 election was appointed to the Cabinet by newly elected prime minister Justin Trudeau. She is the author of Sale of the Century, a 2000 book about Russia’s journey from Communist state rule to capitalism, and Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else in 2012. Her maternal grandfather, Michael Chomiak or Mykhailo Khomiak in Ukrainian, had been a journalist before World War II. During the war he was chief editor of the antisemitic daily newspaper Krakivs’ki visti for the Nazi regime. Her office has denied that her grandfather ever collaborated with the Nazi Germany. She attended Old Scona High School in Alberta and Rhodes College in Oxford, England. She received a bachelor of arts degree in Russian literature and studies from Stony Antony’s College, Oxford, and a master of studies degree in Slavonic studies from Oxford University. She started her career as a stringer for the Financial Times before attending the United World College of the Adriatic in Italy.

She also worked for the Globe and Mail and Reuters, becoming managing director of the latter. Her father, Donald Freeland, was a farmer and lawyer and a member of the Liberal Party, and his sister, Beulah, was the wife of a federal member of Parliament, Ged Baldwin. Her paternal grandmother, Helen Caulfield,. was a WWII war bride from Glasgow. Her mother, Halyna Chomiaks, was born at a hospital administered by the US Army; her parents were staying at the displaced persons camp at a spa resort in Bad Wörishofen, Germany. As Ukraine experienced democratic backsliding from the 1990s, Freeland saw firsthand the consequences of her mother’s activism as a prominently prominent member of the Ukrainian Canadian community. Her grandfather, Wilbur Freeland was a lawyer who rode in the Calgary Stampede. His sister, beulah was a wife of the wife of aFederal member of parliament, Ging Baldwin. She later became a lawyer and mother-of-two. She now lives in Toronto with her husband and their two children, a son, a daughter and a son-in-law. She works as a freelance journalist in Toronto, Ontario, and is the first woman to hold the finance portfolio. She lives in the Toronto riding of University—Rosedale in the House of Commons and is married to Toronto Mayor Jim Watson. Her husband, Jim Watson, is a former Toronto city councillor and former mayor of Toronto.