Transcript: Catherine Tsalikis

An interview with the Toronto journalist and author

The Liberal leadership race is heating up, and former deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland has now thrown her hat in the ring. Freeland is a powerful figure in Canadian politics, a former journalist who went on to become one of the Prime Minister’s most loyal cabinet members — until her surprise resignation in December. Today on the program, as Freeland campaigns to win the Liberal leadership, and thus the top job in the country, we take a closer look at her life and its controversies with the author of a recent biography.

Catherine Tsalikis is a Toronto journalist who covers foreign policy, politics, and gender. She’s the author of Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

---

TH: I've been looking forward to discussing this book with you. Of course, it could not be more timely. As you know, I've been quite critical of Freeland’s policies. But nevertheless, I did find the book fascinating and a really compelling read. As she has the chance of becoming our next prime minister, however briefly, I think it's really important to know as much as we can about her. Before we get to the arc of her life —and the controversies surrounding her time in government — your publication date was moved up because Freeland made the surprise announcement that she was resigning as finance minister. I know that took everybody by surprise, including you. But just to get this out of the way at the very beginning, for context for listeners: This is an unauthorized biography without participation from Freeland. Have you heard anything from her since it came out?

CT: I have not. Not that I've asked. I honestly feel like it's better to have a Chinese firewall between the two of us. I've kept everything at arm's length. I have gotten lots of questions, as I've been doing events: “Is she going to show up? Have you invited her?” But no. I think, also, that she would say she never Googles herself; she doesn't really read about herself much. I would be surprised if she had had the time in the last few weeks to sit down with the book. I think unauthorized makes it sound a bit more salacious than it actually is. But yeah, I think we made the decision to have a little bit of a remove. I was comfortable with painting a portrait of her through the eyes of those who have known her. But I did not have her resigning in such dramatic fashion on my Bingo card for 2024.

TH: It's been quite a new cycle, for sure. And just one question also to get out of the way here. What's the fact-checking process? I know non-fiction publishers do not hire fact-checkers. How did you go about ensuring the accuracy of the information you've reported here, which is so voluminous?

CT: I think this was part of the reason why it took me so darn long to write. I blew past a couple of deadlines. Anansi had wanted this in a year. I just said, “There’s no way.” It was about a year and a bit interviewing people, and then another year and a bit writing, so maybe three — closer to four with editing. That was one of my fears, starting this: getting something wrong. There's no fact-checking baked into the process. The publishers don't have them. There's also no space in the timeline that if you wanted to hire your external one, it would have to be all at the same time. And so, that wasn't possible. What I did was, like any journalist, you just evaluate the source that you're speaking with. If it was someone who I felt was trustworthy, authoritative, if I heard something from her sister, her best friends from Harvard — those are things I felt comfortable putting in.

There were stories that I heard from colleagues that I would try and triangulate. So if I heard something, I would speak with somebody else, or reach out to somebody else who I know would have been privy to that situation, or on the same team or whatnot, and get it there. If I could not triangulate that with at least two people, I had put together a list for her office that I had sent over. It took a year, but there are about 30 questions or so — things that I didn't feel comfortable putting in the book. So I put it to her team and they finally got back to me. They either said, “Yeah, that's how it is,” or clarified, stuff like that. I did the best I could. I think it's a shame that we don't have New Yorker-level fact checkers in publishing. But I think, given the timelines and the resources … the teams don't exist for that. Everything that’s in there, I was comfortable putting it in. There was stuff that I would have loved to include, but I didn't feel like it had the legs, so I left it out. But that's part of why I wanted to speak with so many people, to make sure my bases were covered.

TH: You interviewed 130 people close to Freeland. You spoke to some of her family members, her sister, her aunt, as well as former colleagues, college friends, former counterparts in NAFTA negotiations. I do want to just briefly sketch out some of the big moments of her life. Whatever you think about her politics, there is no denying that she is a very ambitious woman, and she has had a very remarkable life. She grew up in Peace River, Alberta — a town of I think something like 7,000 people — how did she find herself at Harvard for undergrad?

CT: It's funny, I've been reading a lot about Mark Carney now, her challenger in the leadership race. They actually have very similar backgrounds. He, too, was born in a very small town, in the Northwest Territories. They both grew up in Edmonton, and found themselves somehow at Harvard, Oxford. In Chrystia’s case, I think it was down to family. Like so many of us, she's such a perfect product of her two parents. On her father's side, her great-grandparents were settlers. They came up from the U.S. in the early 1900s, farmed the land themselves. Her grandfather and father were both farmers and lawyers. From them, she inherited this incontrovertible part of her — her identity as a farm girl. I spoke with friends from her later years, and those are the stories that she tells of herself: toiling on the land, getting her hands dirty, riding horses, driving her father's combine into the pond.

I got a chance to visit. It is such a stunning, idyllic part of the country. It's so remote, in a way. I think it really gives you a sense of wonder of the country. That Canadian identity for sure comes from those years growing up there. But then also, there's her mom's side of the family. Her maternal grandparents came over to Canada from Ukraine following the Second World War. After Chrystia's parents divorced, she grew up in Edmonton with her mom and her sister, and she was thrown into this Ukrainian émigré community in Edmonton. Quite political; lively discussions around the dinner table. They always believed that one day Ukraine would break free from the Soviet Union and gain its independence. And that, to Chrystia and her generation, seemed ridiculous. The Soviet Union seemed like the superpower that would never go away.

Chrystia got a sense of these geopolitical debates and wanted to learn more, and she also always wanted to be in the room where things happen. When she got an offer to Harvard, she felt like that was the institution that would get her on her way, I think. Then she gets to Harvard and all her professors there in Russian history, literature, also feel that her grandparents are dreaming this impossible dream. But when she actually goes on the ground — she goes on exchange to Ukraine and then returns as a budding journalist — she sees that perhaps they are wrong. And sure enough, Ukraine does get its independence. She's there on the ground to cover it. I think that was kind of the core tenet of her belief that people could actually change systems, and also that democracy isn't something that's inevitable. That ties into her belief that Canada can make a difference in the world. It's quite poetic. She was witnessing the biggest story of the decade, really. But yeah, really takes it to heart.

TH: Just to put a pin in this, there is a controversy about one of her grandfathers. We'll come back to that in a moment. But just while we're on the family theme, she does have a family member who's a diplomat as well, correct?

CT: Retired diplomat, if you're referring to her aunt Larissa. This is her late mom's sister. She was working in a department when Chrystia was a teenager that dealt with the United World Colleges, which is this group of schools that has campuses all over the world. It was this aunt that suggested to Chrystia's mom that maybe Chrystia would like to do some time abroad. So, she actually did two years of her high school in Italy at one of those UWC colleges. [Her aunt] rose to become a diplomat. She's retired now. I spoke with her. Chrystia would stay at her apartment when she first became an MP in Ottawa. She lived a quick 15-minute walk or so away from Parliament Hill.

It's funny you asked that: How do you find yourself there? I never actually thought about that too much. She doesn't speak about her aunt that often, but seeing a close family member go to Ottawa and be sent around the world to make a change for Canada? I'm sure that maybe played into what she wanted to do with her future.

TH: As you say, Chrystia ends up in Ukraine. She is 20 years old. She is an exchange student. It is a pivotal moment in the country's history. What do we know about the role that she played in its independence movement?

CT: I think she would be the first to say, I don't think she played [much of a role]. She didn't lead them to independence or anything like that. But I think this showed her the power of journalism. She was there for a year on exchange, but there were a lot of Western journalists on the ground who needed help translating. She had the language. She spoke Ukrainian. 

TH: And Russian and Italian, right?

CT: Not yet. The Russian, she learned at Harvard, so she was probably in the middle of figuring that out. Italian, yes. She had learned from her two years in Italy. I spoke with Bill Keller, who is the former executive editor of The New York Times. That year, he won a Pulitzer for his coverage, being on the ground there. He told me, “I don't remember how I found Chrystia. But knowing her, she probably found me.” She has demonstrated this propensity to know how to connect with people, and to make herself useful to important people. I think you see that as a theme across her career. She worked with Keller on a story uncovering these mass graves that the Soviet regime had said were, I believe it was, that the Nazis were responsible for them, but actually it was the Soviet secret police.

They broke this story, and she was able to convince villagers to talk to Bill Keller. That showed her the power of journalism to tell stories, but also uncover information that the authorities would rather stay hidden. So, she was hooked. She also smuggled pro-independence Ukrainian photos and literature across borders. She brought some back to London. She brought stuff into the country from London, and was stopped by the border guards at the airport in Moscow. This brought her to the attention of the Soviet authorities, who sent a telegram to the Canadian embassy in Moscow, saying that your national is a well-known troublemaker, please get her under control. But she demonstrated a certain backbone, I think, and a certain fearlessness — and real belief in that cause. I don't know what effect those things had. But she was certainly willing to throw herself into, as I say, the cause.

TH: But people listening here might think: She's a target for the KGB, she's under surveillance. They have studied her extensively. You mentioned the diplomatic cable and the carrying clandestine materials across the border. I mean, what was going on here? Is Freeland an activist? Was she just a journalist? Is she possibly involved with the intelligence community at this point? How do we know?

CT: I think I say this in the book that sometimes the line between journalist and activist blurred, for sure. At the time, she was a university student. I think she was still finding her way. She didn't know at the time that she did want to be a journalist. She thought maybe an academic or a politician or a lawyer. But I think that was also fairly standard fare for Westerners who there. There weren't many behind the iron curtain at the time. I was told that anyone coming from Canada would be under surveillance by the KGB. 

Later, after she finishes her degree at Harvard, she has some time to kill before her degree at Oxford. She goes to Ukraine and starts as a stringer there for various news organizations. She's reporting on the independence movement, but she also has this op-ed in The Toronto Star. Which is funny, because she excoriates the bureaucracy — foreshadowing to her time as foreign affairs minister, where she was known as not paying much credence to the civil service and the bureaucracy. So, her views on that I don't think have changed. But yeah, the op-ed was saying that we need to recognize Ukraine.

I think that there were so many Westerners on the ground doing similar things. I couldn't find any evidence of it being “spy” activity. She obviously had some connections in the diplomatic circles, in the embassy. There's certain things that she got out of the country that would have required these diplomatic pouches. She would have had contacts in the embassy. But I think it was just such a heady time. And she never makes anybody confused — whether her journalism years or her government policy — about where she stands on Ukraine. I spoke with colleagues at The Financial Times, the correspondent for Russia at the time, who worked closely with her, and he said that her copy was meticulously neutral. It was rigorous. She was able to kind of separate that. Because that was a question I had too. I spoke with the editor of The Economist, who appreciated the view. He felt like he was getting an even better view than George Bush was getting in the White House, because all of the White House's info was filtered through Moscow. Whereas Chrystia was actually on the ground in Ukraine. So I thought that was interesting too.

And then in the future, maybe not in deference to the civil service, she will go to the person she thinks has the best information. I feel like those lessons come from this time on the ground in Ukraine.

TH: It is sort of astonishing to think of how young she was. Then she ended up at the Financial Times, a very prestigious outlet, and she enjoyed this meteoric rise. Of course, I had known she was a successful journalist, and I have spoken to reporters who worked with her. But I didn't fully comprehend just how successful she was until I read your book. We're talking elite, elite media here — belonging to this tiny subset that get reported on at The New York Post’s Page Six, for example. You spoke to people she worked with, as well as some of her detractors. What qualities do you think enabled her to rise through the ranks at the speed that she did?

CT: It was also stunning to me how young she was. I was thinking when I was 24, could I even get an internship? She was 25, 26, leading The Financial Times in Moscow. I know for her first posting, when she became Moscow bureau chief in Russia in the mid-90s, she was the youngest ever to hold that job. The top brass wasn't sure; they took a chance on her. She was there, she knew the language. By then she had mastered Russian. So, they decided to give her a shot. She really performed for them on the ground in Russia. She was able to make these contacts with these rich, powerful men, these oligarchs, the business titans — as one person put it to me, with a bit of blood under their fingernails. These are kind of scary men.

But the way she was able to do that and then get scoop after scoop — and report her on their corrupt business dealings — was she would prepare. She would just talk to everybody. She would do the work and she would practice putting various [things to them]. “Okay, if they say this, I'm going to say this. I have this evidence.” So she was prepared. She had the language. That put her ahead of a lot of others in the Moscow press core. Which, I should say, her success in Moscow did definitely rank some of her male colleagues. They saw her as competitive, aloof. But then one of her friends said that was just the mantle you have to put on if you're going to do better than others in a very male-dominated environment. She also had a certain charm people described, which is funny because I don't know that she comes off that way to the public. Her detractors would say she's a bit aloof, condescending. I've heard schoolmarmsish. But people who know her describe her as really charming; she would kind of disarm them.

She's quite diminutive. She's 5’2. [The oligarchs] would kind of forget that this woman that they were speaking with was committing everything to memory, and she was going to write about it the next day for The Financial Times. So, she was able to get her stories, and then she just rose. You would have to speak to her managers, which I did. I think they saw her as someone who could get things done. And you see that is echoed in her time in government, right? Justin Trudeau, she became the person he relied upon a in crisis after crisis to get stuff done. So, yeah, I think it's a combination of things. She definitely knows how to connect and get along with management, but she also has the work ethic and the smarts to back that up.

TH: You've touched on something I find really interesting, as I was reading through. I mean, one of the chief criticisms we hear about her — aside from the controversies, which we are going to dig into next — is that she's not a very good retail politician. That she's not a great door-knocker; she's not super good at connecting with the public at events. And yet, the story that you have painted here, the kind of success she found in journalism, you can't accomplish that without being very charismatic. Without being very good with people. So, I don't understand the tension there.

CT: Honestly, it is something that has vexed me for several years now. I just think there's a disconnect between her public persona and the people who know her. And you see this not just in the journalism years, but the way she's been able to build coalitions in government, reach across the aisle. You have Doug Ford singing her praises. For the childcare deal, she was able to get these conservative male [premiers] to get on board with her national childcare plan. In NAFTA, I spoke with both the negotiators on the U.S. side and on the Mexican side — all of them have glowing things to say about this woman. 

TH: Except for Trump.

CT: Except for Trump. But his guys, like Lighthizer and the team under him. And so, how does she do this? People describe to me that she's warm. She likes people, across the board. People have told me she likes people. I don't know if I would say she's not good at door-knocking. I get the sense that she really does enjoy these visits on the doorstep. Her team — I spoke with — said during various campaigns, they would have to pull her away. 

But what we see as a public, on TV, definitely does not come across. She doesn't have the charisma of an Obama, or even of a Trudeau. I think that's perhaps just her style. I spoke with her second grade teacher who told me that when she gives a speech, that measured, slow way of talking — that's her mom. So, maybe it's genetic. I also think that that's not a part of her image that she's particularly concerned with, either. She doesn't go heavy on the comms. She doesn't care about what she wears, or what she looks like. That's a part of the job that I don't think she pays lip service to. So I don't know. Again, is it partly because she's a woman? I'm not sure. I'd be curious to ask more political expert watchers on that. But there definitely is this disconnect there.

TH: One of her detractors that you spoke to was from her last media job, at Thomson Reuters. Tell us what happened at the end of her media career, just as Trudeau and his team were trying to recruit her. One of the women that she fired spoke to you. Reuters was closing its Toronto newsroom and shipping the jobs overseas. I'm curious about that anecdote, what you took away from it. Tell us a little bit about that.

CT: Leah Eichler was a manager in the Toronto newsroom. Chrystia was based in New York City. So, Chrystia came in. Leah was on mat leave, but she came in to meet with Chrystia. She had a bunch of ideas that she thought could improve the newsroom for the future going forward. Thought they were doing quite well, I think. I spoke with a few people, actually, from this defunct Toronto newsroom. And yeah, it seemed to be doing well, but Chrystia informed her … She just said, “I'm going to stop you right there. It's always difficult when the new people come in to overthrow the ancien regime.” And then, they did. They shuttered the newsroom. This was right before Christmas and the jobs went overseas. It is still raw for a lot of the people who worked in that newsroom. I think the fact that she's Canadian and then went on to base her whole agenda around inequality and fighting for the middle class — the fact that these were good middle class jobs that went overseas — not a great look.

But then I spoke with people on the management side in New York City who said this was a business decision. These were jobs that could have been done elsewhere for cheaper. She definitely didn't seem to fight very hard to keep them, but I think that that put some people's backs up for sure. But then, yeah, it's a huge media conglomerate. How much was she personally responsible? I'm not sure. Plus, she had her job in New York, which was keeping her busy enough — this project to revamp the entire website. But yeah, it was an illustration of how hard it is to really put into practise …

I've kind of come out of this project thinking you can go into politics with these really lofty ideals and really believe you want to make a difference, but you are up against this system, in which it is very hard to make a difference and change things. I hope someone will do this — I don't feel I'm qualified to do it — but kind of like an assessment of, okay, she came in wanting to help the middle class. What did you actually do? What did you actually accomplish? I feel like I'm weakest on the economy. I feel like foreign affairs is more my gambit. But you can come up against all these unforeseen events and individuals. How plausible is it to move the needle?

TH: I'm so glad you brought that up, because that's something I wanted to ask you about. This is something I thought about a lot, reading your book. Here is someone who said they care very deeply about income inequality — came to politics expressly to address it. And her time in politics has been one of real struggle for ordinary Canadians. She authored a book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. And yet, the early pandemic saw an increase of 68% to billionaire wealth in this country. The housing crisis has spiraled out of control, and an unchecked immigration system, and the temporary foreign worker program in particular, has undermined the position of low-wage workers in this country. Meanwhile, Freeland herself has sometimes been perceived as out of touch. I'm thinking about the public reaction to her comments about her family cutting off their subscription to Disney+, which you included in the book. This is a huge question, and I don't know how we resolve it in five minutes, but how did she end up going so wrong on this issue that she said she cared about so much?