“Love him or loathe him,” Chrystia Freeland writes, “you could not deny that he was a leader with balls.” The former deputy prime minister penned that line about Justin Trudeau, the man who led the cabinet she sat in.
It appears in her new book, “Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider’s View of Dealing with a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats and Other Complicated People.”
The book draws on her years inside the Trudeau government.
Freeland does not stop at praise. She also describes a prime minister who held people at arm’s length.
She writes that “history will be kind” to the former Canadian leader.
In the same pages, she says his interactions with constituents and colleagues always stayed on the surface.
According to Freeland, Trudeau kept his distance from “anyone who might come close to being a peer.” She says that group included cabinet members in particular.
The book also takes readers into the cabinet room itself. “Crying was routine at cabinet meetings,” it states.
Andrew Phillips, a columnist for The Hamilton Spectator, read the book and drew attention to that passage.
Phillips reports that “Kleenex was kept on hand for ministers overcome with emotion.” He adds that “some would get hugs from the PM.”
Language drew just as much attention as emotion, Freeland writes.
She says Trudeau reacted angrily when colleagues used everyday, non-work terminology around the table.
Freeland gives one example. A “very progressive female colleague” described something as “crazy” during a meeting.
Phillips writes that the colleague then took a “long, harsh public scolding from Trudeau.”
The prime minister suggested a different word, “bananas,” so people with actual mental health problems would not feel offended, according to Phillips.
Phillips also reports Freeland’s reaction. In his words, she was “appalled when Trudeau openly bullied people around him and policed the language used at the cabinet table.”
Freeland did not support the tone policing or the virtue signalling, Phillips writes. She spelled out her objection in the book.
She argues that this kind of behaviour makes people think “that their leaders are more focused on the performance of virtue than on actually improving people’s lives.”
The Globe and Mail has also covered the book. The newspaper calls it “part memoir, part political polemic.”
Readers who expect the title to refer to Trudeau will find otherwise. Freeland names the “unreliable boyfriend” as the United States of America.
She aims her critique at Canada’s neighbour and closest ally to the south. Her portrait of the country carries some compliments, along with a pointed complaint.
Freeland writes that Donald Trump can be “appealing and fun.” She also says he was right to question globalization.
She then turns to the American role in the alliance.
The United States “played the part of a Father Knows Best, 1950s-style patriarch to his allied wives,” she writes.
By her account, that country has now become unreliable in its leadership of the family she describes.
