In Unreliable Boyfriend, Chrystia Freeland details the rift between her and Trudeau

In Unreliable Boyfriend, one-time finance minister and deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland digs into how her political relationship with Justin Trudeau went from a warm face-to-face invite into public service to a cold Zoom call where he booted her from the finance role years later.

While the book's "unreliable boyfriend" is the United States under U.S. President Donald Trump, readers could be forgiven for thinking the title is actually inspired by Trudeau.

She enthuses about how the pair worked together on the trade file, their management of the pandemic and their rollout of national child care. Yet she also details Trudeau's slide into unpopularity, penchant for humiliating members of his cabinet, word-policing and tendency to pick on those weaker than him.

While their relationship ended bitterly, she is still able to praise Trudeau for his strengths, one of which she noticed at a party in Toronto in late 2012, before Trudeau the Liberal MP became Trudeau the prime minister.

At that party celebrating the launch of Freeland's book Plutocrats, her father cornered Trudeau to convey his thoughts on politics, eager to speak with "Liberal political royalty."

"I was mortified," Freeland recalled as she rushed over to try and free Trudeau from her father's grip — only to learn that the future prime minister was enjoying the chat.

WATCH | Trudeau and Freeland over the years:

Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland over the years

December 24, 2024|

Duration

5:21

The following summer Freeland was invited to a breakfast that included Trudeau and former Ontario premier and current MP Bob Rae.

She was told Rae was stepping down from his Toronto seat and was asked if she'd consider running in an upcoming byelection.

"I spent the next six weeks agonizing over Justin's offer," she wrote. 

She worried about uprooting her children from the life she and her husband had built for them in New York. And with the Liberals in third place, she knew she may be "joining a lost cause."

In the end she wrote that she was won over by "Trudeau's kindness to my dad" and her father's encouragement to accept the offer.

Knowing when to play hardball

One of Trump's first moves as president was to sign an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. By the spring of 2017, Trump was also threatening to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). 

The remaining TPP countries were set to sign the pact on the margins of a November summit in Da Nang, Vietnam. But Freeland, who was foreign affairs minister at the time, wrote that Trudeau wanted a better deal.

In a call with then international trade minister François-Philippe Champagne, Freeland and others, Trudeau humiliated Champagne for not securing concessions on intellectual property and other issues. 

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"I still cringe as I remember it — the embarrassment I felt at hearing a colleague humiliated reminded me of feeling bad for my childhood friends in Peace River when they got spanked while I was over to play."

When Canada refused to sign the deal, Freeland wrote Trudeau angered both Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Despite that pushback, Freeland said she admired the defiance.

"Trudeau showed that, love him or loathe him, you could not deny that he was a leader with balls," she wrote.

Freeland said with NAFTA talks coming up, it was important to let the White House know when it came to trade deals, Canada "was prepared to play hardball."

The 'FAFO' fight for free trade

By early 2018, Freeland wrote she had grown so "worried that American proposals could kill NAFTA" she'd begun writing a speech to deliver after its demise.

During particularly fraught meetings with U.S. officials in Washington, Freeland admitted she would occasionally "take refuge in the ladies' washroom" which was a safe place because, she said, there were almost never any women on the U.S. side of the table.

"Once, at a particularly dire moment, I got down on my knees on the cold white tiles in front of the sinks and prayed," she wrote. 

Freeland said that Canada only managed to save that deal because it imposed retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. when it hit Canada with steel and aluminum tariffs, targeting key Republican districts. 

That "FAFO" approach, and Trudeau's willingness to employ it, she wrote, was what ensured Canada got back to a "reciprocal relationship with our neighbour."

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She said the details of the new NAFTA, an agreement Canadians now call the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), were largely left to her.

Trudeau "got extremely involved in the fine print of his own public appearances … on trade he didn't dive into the details," she said.

Still, she described the saving of NAFTA as "Trudeau's finest hour … the moment when Canada's playboy prince became a true national leader."

But Freeland says Trudeau's political stock was already in decline on another front thanks to his ill-fated trip to India.

Trudeau, his then wife Sophie Grégoire Trudeau and children Xavier and Ella-Grace are seen during their February 2018 trip to India. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

She described Trudeau's state visit to India in February 2018 as "a political disaster" where his over-the-top outfits became a distraction — and a Canadian of Indian descent, Jaspal Atwal, who was convicted of attempted murder for trying to assassinate an Indian cabinet minister, turned up at an official event.

Crying at cabinet meetings

Over the next few years, Trudeau landed achievements that Freeland wrote will be judged kindly by history. She praised him for his role in securing trade deals with the U.S., EU and the Pacific Rim countries, rolling out a national daycare program and managing the pandemic. But she noted that Canadians had started to sour on him for his "self-righteous exhibitionism."

"Crying was routine at cabinet meetings," she wrote. "There were always boxes of Kleenex on hand, and really sad colleagues would sometimes get a hug from the PM."

Freeland noted one moment when Trudeau gave a female colleague a "long, harsh public scolding" for describing something as crazy. 

Trudeau apparently told the colleague that the term was a "derogatory adjective" that was "insulting to people with mental health issues."

The term Trudeau wanted them to use instead was "bananas."

Freeland receives applause from Trudeau after delivering her last federal budget in the House of Commons in 2024. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

Freeland said she objected to "linguistic purity tests" because some people struggle to keep up — but her larger objection was about something else. 

"I think what troubled me the most about the crying in cabinet and the lectures about word choice was that it sometimes went along with what seemed like bullying," she wrote. 

While Freeland said she has no problem with trying to bully people like Trump or Vladimir Putin, she didn't like it when she saw Trudeau "pushing weaker people around."

Chrétien's advice

As the years rolled on and Trudeau's popularity declined, Freeland said she came to understand that Trudeau's gift of making strangers feel like "they are the most important person in the world" stopped short of his peers. 

"We might walk together for the cameras but none of us, even his personal friends from childhood, had intimate political relationships with him," she wrote. "Few of us ever spent time with him one-on-one."

As rumours began to swirl that Trudeau was going to replace Freeland as finance minister with former central bank governor (and now prime minister) Mark Carney, she sought advice from former Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien in November 2024.

She said Chrétien told her that her loyalty had reached its logical limit. 

Freeland said Chrétien told her that as long as she remains in cabinet, and keeps publicly declaring she supports Trudeau, he would stay on as prime minister and the party would lose the next election.

"Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre will become prime minister and the Liberal Party will be devastated. And if that happens, it will be partly your fault, because your continued support is what is making it possible for Justin Trudeau to stay in office," she said Chrétien told her. 

Prime Minister Mark Carney walks with Freeland after a cabinet meeting in September 2025. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

Freeland was due to deliver her government's fall economic statement on Dec. 16. She wrote that with Trump set to be sworn in as president for the second time just weeks later, it was time to tighten up finances and prepare for what could be a protracted economic war.

Days before that statement was to be delivered, she said that Trudeau "removed over $12 billion in spending cuts" that Freeland had included to help prepare.

"I knew that, in this consequential moment, Trudeau was focused solely on his own political survival," she said. "And, in his desperation, he was doing increasingly stupid things."

The third-worst day of her life

On Friday the 13th — three days before she was set to deliver that economic statement — Trudeau arranged a Zoom call where she says he told her: "I no longer want you to serve as my finance minister."

She described it as the third-worst day of her life after the death of her mother and her parent's divorce. 

Freeland says she was told she would retain the deputy prime minister title and would still be responsible for the Canada-U.S. relationship — but without a department to back her up. 

When Freeland asked who would replace her, Trudeau told her it would be Carney.

Freeland wrote that Trudeau still wanted Freeland to deliver the economic statement and gave her time to think it over. 

"Rather than be fired, I resigned," she wrote. "The Zoom call with Trudeau had taught me that I simply couldn't trust the PM — and that he had decided not to trust me."

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Describing her resignation from cabinet as "maybe the most significant resignation letter in Canadian political history," Freeland claimed credit for bringing down one prime minister, thwarting Poilievre's chance to become the next one and clearing the way for Carney to swoop in for the kill. 

After the news hit, Freeland wrote that Chrétien called her and congratulated her for "doing the right thing."

Despite losing the subsequent Liberal leadership race to Carney, Freeland said she thinks she "could have won the 2025 election" and "been an effective PM."

Still, she said Carney is an "excellent" prime minister.

"I am proud my decision helped him get the top job, even though I ended up paying a pretty steep political price," she said.