The Honourable Chrystia Freeland
Deputy Prime Minister of Canada
*The scheduled appearance by The Honourable Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, has been postponed due to Parliamentary obligations.
The Honourable Chrystia Freeland was first elected as a Member of Parliament for Toronto Centre in July 2013. She was elected as a Member of Parliament for University-Rosedale in October 2015, and re-elected in October 2019.
From 2015 to 2017, Minister Freeland served as Canada's Minister of International Trade, overseeing the successful negotiation of Canada's free trade agreement with the European Union, CETA. From 2017 to 2019, she served as Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. She was named Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs in November 2019.
An esteemed journalist and author, Minister Freeland was born in Peace River, Alberta. She was educated at Harvard University before continuing her studies on a Rhodes Scholarship at the University of Oxford.
After beginning her career in journalism as a Ukraine-based freelance reporter for the Financial Times, The Washington Post, and The Economist, she went on to various roles at the Financial Times. She then served as deputy editor of The Globe and Mail between 1999 and 2001, before returning to the Financial Times as deputy editor and then as the United States managing editor.
In 2010, she joined Canadian-owned Thomson Reuters. She was a managing director of the company and editor of consumer news when she decided to return home and enter politics in 2013.
Minister Freeland has written two books: Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution (2000); and Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (2012). Plutocrats is an international best-seller and won the Lionel Gelber Prize and National Business Book Award.
In 2018, Minister Freeland was recognized as Foreign Policy's Diplomat of the Year and was awarded the Eric M. Warburg Award by Atlantik-Brücke for her achievements in strengthening transatlantic ties.
Minister Freeland speaks Russian, Ukrainian, Italian, French, and English, and lives in Toronto with her husband and three children.