Chrystia Freeland

In January 2019, at the request of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Canada granted asylum to 18-year-old Saudi teenager Rahaf Mohammed, who was fleeing her abusive family in Kuwait; Freeland personally greeted Rahaf Mohammed at Toronto Pearson International Airport.

In April 18, 2019, she was ranked 37th among the world's leading leaders in Fortune Magazine' s annual list.

Freeland voiced support for the 2019 Hong Kong protests. In October 2019, Freeland condemned the unilateral Turkish invasion of the Kurdish areas in Syria.

Following the 2019 Canadian federal election, Freeland was promoted to Deputy Prime Minister of Canada and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs.

Freeland issued a statement via Twitter on August 2, 2018 expressing Canada's concern over the recent arrest of Samar Badawi, a human rights activist and sister of imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi. She advocated their release. In response to Canada's criticism, Saudi Arabia expelled Canada's ambassador, and froze trade with Canada. Freeland asked for help from allies including Germany, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

In September 2018, Freeland raised the issue of Xinjiang re-education camps and human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslim minority in a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

In a Cabinet reshuffle on January 10, 2017, Freeland was appointed to the position of Foreign Affairs Minister of Canada, replacing Stéphane Dion. On March 6, 2017, together with Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, Freeland announced Canada's military training mission in Ukraine would be extended until March 2019, maintaining the 200 soldiers previously mandated by the Harper government.

In August 2017, Freeland has instructed her department and officials to 'energetically' review reports of Canadian-made military vehicles being used against civilians in Shia-populated city of Al-Awamiyah by Saudi Arabian security forces.

Freeland was involved in negotiations leading up to the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), between Canada and the European Union, former PM Stephen Harper's "legacy project". CETA is Canada's "biggest trade deal since NAFTA". After it was signed October 30, 2016, Freeland made comments about "building bridges and not building walls".

On November 4, 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chose Freeland as Minister of International Trade.

As the Liberal Party of Canada's trade critic, Freeland interviewed noted economist Larry Summers in a formal event at the 2014 Liberal Party convention; the interview is available on YouTube and the party website. Freeland wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, in which she contraposed the rise of the plutocrats with the popularity of the television series Downton Abbey.

On January 27, 2014, during the demonstrations leading up to the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, Freeland wrote an op-ed for The Globe and Mail, in which she excoriated the government of Viktor Yanukovich. She is a proponent of personal asset seizures and travel bans as part of programmes of economic sanctions. Later, at the beginning of March, Freeland visited Ukraine on behalf of the Liberal Party, and tweeted her progress in meeting community leaders and members of the government in Kyiv. She lunched with the chief rabbi of Kyiv, met with Mustafa Dzhemilev, leader of the Crimean Tatars and an MP, and with Vitaly Klitchko, who is leader of the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform party, and with Ukrainian MP Petro Poroshenko, who was subsequently elected President of Ukraine in May 2014, Ukrainian presidential elections.

Freeland was one of thirteen Canadians banned from travelling to Russia under retaliatory sanctions imposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2014. She replied through her official Twitter feed, "Love Russ lang/culture, loved my yrs in Moscow; but it's an honour to be on Putin's sanction list, esp in company of friends Cotler & Grod."

She worked in a variety of editorial positions at the Financial Times, The Globe and Mail and Thomson Reuters (where she was the managing director and editor for consumer news), before announcing her intention to run for the Liberal Party nomination in the by-election to replace Bob Rae as the Member of Parliament for Toronto Centre. After winning the Liberal nomination on September 15, 2013, she was elected to parliament in the November 25, 2013 by-election. Appointed to the Cabinet of Canada as Minister of International Trade on November 4, 2015, Freeland was named that month as one of Toronto's 50 most influential by Toronto Life magazine. On January 10, 2017, Freeland was appointed the Minister of Foreign Affairs, succeeding Stéphane Dion. She served through the end of the First Trudeau Ministry and was replaced by Francois-Philippe Champagne following the 2019 Canadian federal election.

Plutocrats was a New York Times bestseller, and the winner of the 2013 Lionel Gelber Prize for non-fiction reporting on foreign affairs. It also won the 2013 National Business Book Award for the most outstanding Canadian business-related book.

On July 26, 2013, Freeland left journalism to enter Canadian politics as a candidate for the nomination of the Liberal Party in the riding of Toronto Centre. On September 15, 2013 she won the nomination, with an opportunity to replace outgoing MP Bob Rae in the November 25, 2013 by-election. During the campaign she received criticism for purchasing a 1.3 million dollar home, although the price was consistent with Toronto's home prices. Freeland won 49% of the vote and was elected.

She has lived in Toronto since the summer of 2013 when she returned from abroad to run for election. She speaks Ukrainian at home with her children. Apart from that and English, she speaks Italian and Russian, and is conversant in French. She is the co-owner, with her sister, of an apartment which overlooks the Maidan square in Kiev.

In the riding redistribution of 2012 and 2013, much of Freeland's base was shifted from Toronto Centre to the new riding of University-Rosedale, while seemingly making Toronto Centre less safe for her. Then, in the 2015 federal election, Freeland opted to run in University-Rosedale, and defeated NDP challenger Jennifer Hollett.

From 1999 to 2001 Freeland served as the deputy editor of The Globe and Mail. Next she worked as the managing director and editor of consumer news at Thomson Reuters. She was also a weekly columnist for the Globe and Mail. Previously she was editor of Thomson Reuters Digital, a position she held since April 2011. Prior to that she was the global editor-at-large of Reuters news since March 1, 2010, having formerly been the United States managing editor at the Financial Times, based in New York City.

Freeland appeared several times between 2010 and 2015 as a panellist on Real Time with Bill Maher. She has also made appearances on The McLaughlin Group, The Dylan Ratigan Show, Imus in the Morning, Fareed Zakaria GPS, and The Colbert Report. She is a frequent guest on public radio's political debate program Left, Right & Center, produced by KCRW. In addition, Freeland was featured on a panel discussion on Tom Ashbrook's On Point regarding inequality and democracy in the United States. In June 2013 she gave a speech at the TED Talks, speaking on the subjects of economic inequality, plutocracy, globalization, and "the growing gap between the working poor and the increasingly disconnected mega-rich."

Freeland is the author of Sale of the Century, a 2000 book about Russia's journey from communism to capitalism and Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else in 2012. Plutocrats was the winner of the 2013 Lionel Gelber Prize for non-fiction reporting on foreign affairs. It also won the 2013 National Business Book Award for the most outstanding Canadian business-related book.

Freeland is the author of Sale of the Century, a 2000 book about Russia's journey from communism to capitalism and Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else in 2012.

Freeland attended Old Scona Academic High School in Edmonton, Alberta for two years before attending the United World College of the Adriatic in Italy, on a merit scholarship from the Alberta government for a project that sought to promote international peace and understanding. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Russian history and literature from Harvard University and a Master of Studies degree in Slavonic Studies from St Antony's College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1993.

Freeland's mother, Halyna Chomiak, 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. Halyna's Ukrainian Catholic parents were Mykhailo Khomiak (Anglicized as Michael Chomiak), born in Stroniatyn, Galicia, and Alexandra Loban, originally of Rudniki, near Stanislaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk). As Ukraine experienced democratic backsliding from the 1990s, Freeland, who grew up in Alberta, saw "firsthand" the consequences of her mother's activism as a "prominent member of the Ukrainian Canadian community."

Freeland's maternal grandfather, Mykhailo Khomiak in Ukrainian, had been a journalist before World War II, and during the war in Nazi-occupied Poland edited a periodical, Krakivs'ki visti (News of Krakow), supervised directly by the Nazi authorities. After Chomiak's death in 1984, John-Paul Himka, a professor of history at the University of Alberta, who was Chomiak's son-in-law (and also Freeland's uncle by marriage), used Chomiak's records, including old issues of the journal, as the basis of several scholarly papers. However, Chomiak's background was not well known to the general public, and it was considered newsworthy when some Russian-affiliated websites publicized it at the time Freeland was appointed to the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs. Freeland and others have claimed that the circulation of news in 2017 regarding her grandfather's connection to Nazism was the result of a Russian disinformation campaign.

Christina Alexandra "Chrystia" Freeland PC MP (born August 2, 1968) is a Canadian writer, journalist, and politician who, since 2019, is serving as the tenth Deputy Prime Minister of Canada and thirteenth Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. She served as Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2017 to 2019, and Minister of International Trade from 2015 to 2017.

Her father, Donald Freeland, was a farmer and lawyer and a member of the Liberal Party of Canada, and her mother, Halyna Chomiak (1946–2007), was also a lawyer who ran for election in Edmonton Strathcona in the 1988 federal election, representing the New Democratic Party.