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Having first met Freeland when she was a reporter in 1990s Moscow 鈥� where McFaul said she was unusual both for her profound curiosity and tendency to host interesting dinner parties in a city in which it wasn’t easy to get the necessary supplies 鈥� McFaul suggested Freeland would soon become Canada’s foreign affairs minister.听

“It wasn’t a preposterous idea,” McFaul told the Star recently. But, he said, “she just laughed it off.”听

Turns out he was right, and then some.听

Besides Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself 鈥� and maybe a few consiglieres like his long-reigning chief of staff, Katie Telford 鈥� no one has been more important to the current government than Chrystia Freeland. When Donald Trump threatened Canadian trade interests, she led the effort to defend them. When premiers first revolted against Ottawa鈥檚 climate policies, she was named deputy prime minister and tried to dampen their anger. And when Trudeau needed a new finance minister to help steer the country through the cataclysm of the COVID-19 pandemic, he chose Freeland to oversee the government effort to fund emergency programs to keep millions of people and businesses afloat.

鈥淪he has delivered for (Trudeau) in a way that has also built trust over time. She gets the job done,”听said Leslie Church, Freeland鈥檚 chief of staff from 2021 to 2023.

It’s a resume that has placed her on the upper rung of political power, and fed a widely-held expectation that 鈥� if she sticks around 鈥� she will vie for the Liberal leadership whenever Trudeau decides to retire.听

“When the time comes, she’s definitely going to be interested in doing that,” said one senior government official,听who spoke on condition they aren’t named.

Ahead of her fourth budget as finance minister, Freeland is grappling with a very different reality than when she first took on the job. The recent inflation spike, though down markedly from its peak in , remains a stubborn challenge, especially when paired with the jacked-up interest rates that were imposed to tame it. Economists are ringing alarm bells over the country鈥檚 dwindling productivity. And the independent Parliamentary Budget Officer is a higher-than-advertised federal deficit, along with "sluggish" economic growth through the rest of the year.听

The federal government now stands in a political crosswind, and it’s Freeland鈥檚 job to figure out how to weather the storm. From one side, she is buffeted with demands to put more money toward urgent priorities like the beleaguered Canadian military, the housing crisis, and the to fend off the elevating dangers of climate change. From the other side blow warnings about government debt and spending , and Freeland鈥檚 insistence that Ottawa will stick to self-imposed limits that some doubt can be fulfilled without program cuts or tax hikes.

鈥淣ow they are facing the realities of life, which is: money鈥檚 not free and growth is not assured,鈥� said Robert Asselin, senior vice-president of policy听at the Business Council of Canada, who was a senior adviser to former Liberal finance minister Bill Morneau, and to prime ministers Paul Martin and Trudeau.听

鈥淪he’s been incapable of keeping the (prime minister) and (Prime Minister’s Office) in check on spending,” he said.听

All of this is playing out against what polls suggest is an existential threat from Pierre Poilievre鈥檚 Conservatives. Not a day passes without a barbed attack from the main opposition party, blaming the Trudeau Liberals for juicing inflation with their public spending and carbon pricing, while the government tries to demonstrate how rising costs are a global problem and that their marquee climate policy has a marginal impact on the problem.

It doesn’t appear to be working.

Freeland sparked a wave of criticism earlier when she appeared to suggest Canadians struggling to make ends meet could cancel streaming services like Disney Plus. And in recent weeks, Poilievre has cranked up his demands for an election 鈥� right now 鈥� so his Conservatives can topple the government and take power themselves.听

To turn things around, Freeland and Trudeau are trying a different strategy. Instead of waiting to dump a massive budget document full of measures on a single day, the duo has toured the country to unfurl a series of new policies before the budget is released on April 16. Framing their efforts as a response to the economic “unfairness” younger Canadians face, Freeland has stood with Trudeau 鈥� often with her characteristic bobbing head and furrowed brow 鈥� to unveil policies like a new, $1-billion school food program and a $6-billion boost for housing construction efforts.听

Freeland was not available to speak with the Star for this story, her office said. But according to the senior government official, the new strategy has been in the works since last November. The focus now is on finding ways to spur growth and avoid doing anything to reverse inflation’s recent downward trend, which could prevent the Bank of Canada from reducing the interest rates that are driving up mortgage payments and debt costs for many Canadians.听

“We must not get in the way of rates coming down as fast as possible,” the official told the Star. “It would obviously be politically disastrous if we got blamed for doing that.”听

The woman now trying to thread that needle for the Liberal government hails from Peace River, a small town in the rural reaches of northwestern Alberta where 鈥� according to Freeland 鈥� her family of homesteaders got property from the government so long as they cleared the bush and turned it into farmland.听

鈥淚 remember as a child, riding with my father in his tractor as he slowly plowed up the woods,鈥� Freeland said while accepting an award in Berlin, in 2018.

The honour听was in recognition of her perceived success in the first years of the Trudeau government, when Freeland was international trade minister, then foreign affairs minister. Then and now, her work was boosted by what those who know her say is her habit of keeping a wide circle of confidants to call upon for advice.听

“She’s well-informed. She’s open, reaches out to people, and has developed 鈥� obviously 鈥� an extraordinary network not only in the United States, but also in Europe and around the world,” said Robert Zoellick, a former World Bank president who has known Freeland since the 1990s.听

Freeland has also garnered a reputation for hosting what Church called “legendary” dinner parties at her family home in Toronto’s Summerhill neighbourhood. These often feature Freeland herself cooking, Church said, along with guests like U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, historian Timothy Snyder, and the novelist Margaret Atwood.听

Gil McGowan, the head of the Alberta Federation of Labour, said Freeland is the rare politician who will take the time to understand and grapple with policy proposals. While crafting a suite of tax credits to support the green industrial transition away from fossil fuels, McGowan said she visited and discussed the issue with labour groups for hours at a time. “That’s unheard of,” he said.听

To some who know her, Freeland’s devotion to detail and personal ties stems from her years as a journalist, which began in the late 1980s when she was a fixer 鈥� reporter slang for someone with local knowledge who helps a foreign correspondent 鈥� in Soviet-era Kyiv for The New York Times.听She had travelled to the city on exchange from Harvard University, where her 1990 undergraduate thesis referred to听her own observations and interviews with dissidents from Rukh, the chief organ of the Ukrainian nationalist opposition to Soviet rule.听

Larry Summers, a Harvard professor who was later U.S. Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton and economic adviser to Obama, was helping the American government create an approach to post-Soviet Lithuania at the time. He remembers the young Freeland popping into his office, and how he was struck by her “extraordinary” grasp of the dynamics at play in the Soviet economies opening up at the end of the Cold War.

Freeland later attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, then worked as Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, and as an editor at the Globe and Mail and Thomson Reuters news agency.听

“I鈥檝e had a number of quite remarkable students, and none were more impressive or more impressive in what they鈥檝e gone on to do,” Summers told the Star.听

Freeland’s connection to Ukraine stems from her mother, Halyna Chomiak, whose 2007 said she was born in a displaced persons’ camp in 1946, and who went on to be “a leader in the Ukrainian, feminist and leftist communities in Edmonton.” Their Ukrainian forebears had witnessed the man-made famine that听听under Josef Stalin鈥檚 Soviet rule in the 1930s, then endured years of violence that saw the Nazis invade and occupy Ukraine before the Red Army drove them out again. Years later, it emerged that Freeland鈥檚 maternal grandfather had worked at a Nazi-controlled newspaper during the war, as the Ottawa Citizen reported in 2017.

By 2013, Freeland became a recruitment target for the Liberals under their untested new leader, Trudeau.

This was the era of Occupy Wall Street and anxieties about yawning inequalities听after the shock of the 2008 financial meltdown. Freeland had recently published her second book, Plutocrats,听which focused on the global uber-rich, and was seen as someone who could provide an “intellectual underpinning” to the Trudeau Liberals’ emerging policy bent, said Jeremy Broadhurst, a top Trudeau Liberal adviser and strategist who was Freeland’s chief of staff until 2021.听

As Broadhurst explained, that vision was a response to the economic shocks of the day that averted the populist rage by trying to address inequalities. It’s what prompted the Liberals 鈥� soon after their majority win in 2015 鈥� to raise income taxes for the rich while cutting them for the less wealthy, and build upon child payments for parents that were introduced under the Harper Conservatives.听

As foreign minister, Freeland elaborated on these ideas when she argued that progressive domestic policies are needed to maintain public support for the “rules-based” world order of globalized trade and international institutions that Freeland maintains is essential to Canadian interests.

For McFaul, the former American ambassador, Freeland is one of the foremost proponents of this idea of global relations, which many believe is under attack by isolationist right-wing movements in the U.S. and the authoritarianism of Russia and China. Pointing to a marquee听听Freeland gave on the subject in 2018, McFaul said “it was, conceptually, one of the best defences of liberal internationalism out there.”

A similar impulse to use state power to support people seems present in what Church described as Freeland’s “laser-focus” on using the federal government’s spending power to avoid a recession and keep unemployment low during the pit of the pandemic crisis.听

Yet the challenges she now faces as finance minister largely stem from the fallout of decisions made at that time. Governments everywhere cranked up spending, while their central banks helped float the economy by purchasing a huge amount of government bonds. In Canada, federal spending skyrocketed by hundreds of billions of dollars. Freeland and Trudeau introduced new programs like the $30-billion child-care plan, and billions more on tax credits for green industries.听

Asselin, the former Liberal adviser, believes the degree of spending on Freeland’s watch was a “strategic mistake,” since it didn’t kick-start a period of significant economic growth. He predicted Freeland will likely have to make cuts or increase taxes if the Liberals stick to their fiscal targets of reducing debt and capping deficits.听

“She’s very limited in what she can do,” he said.听

Church agreed that the challenge is significant. “There is definitely a heavy burden of being a finance minister in a government with an ambitious policy agenda,” she said. But rather than cuts or tax hikes, Church said there is a “third way” 鈥� triggering growth to bring in more revenue to help pay for it all.听

Whether that is possible is an open question. The slew of prebudget announcements is at least partly catered to making it happen. But if the polls are right, the door could be closing on the Trudeau era. All Freeland’s efforts could be the last gasp before regime change in Ottawa. Or they could be milestones on the path to something more.听

Regardless of what happens, Church said she looks forward to the day when Freeland’s photo is added to the collection of black-and-white portraits of her male predecessors that don the walls of the federal finance building in downtown Ottawa.听

But when they hang Freeland’s, Church said, it should be printed in full colour.听