Chrystia Freeland

In her new role helping to reshape Ukraine’s future, the Canadian politician will need all her famous inventiveness, writes Fred Harter

- Fred Harter

In 1998 an article appeared in Pravda Ukrainy, the mouthpiece of the Ukrainian communist party, under the headline “Red Handed”. It detailed the activities of a young Canadian exchange student in Kyiv, Chrystia Freeland, accusing her of colluding with western intelligence agencies and local agitators.

A KGB report detailed an extensive programme of surveillance against Freeland, who spent her time in Ukraine campaigning for democracy and organising rallies. Her flat was bugged, her movements were tracked and an informer inserted himself into her friendship circle. To send material abroad, she made use of Canada’s diplomatic pouch through an embassy contact.

The colonel who wrote the document was forced to grudgingly admit she was “a remarkable individual” who was “erudite, sociable, persistent, and inventive in achieving her goals”.

Over time Freeland, 57, became a globetrotting journalist for the FT and Reuters, and the star of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau's centre-left cabinet, successively running the trade, foreign and finance portfolios and earning a reputation as the “Minister of Everything”. From 2019-24, she was also deputy prime minister.

Now she is leaving Canadian politics and becoming an unpaid economic adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky tasked with shaping Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction.

Fluent in Russian and Ukrainian, Freeland has deep personal ties to the country. Her mother was born to Ukrainian parents in a postwar refugee camp and moved to Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union. Her grandparents, she wrote in 2015, “saw themselves as political exiles with responsibility to keep alive the idea of an independent Ukraine, which had last existed, briefly, during and after the chaos of the 1917 Russian Revolution.”

Daniel Béland, who directs the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, said this Ukrainian heritage is “part of her personality”.