Chrystia Freeland has a great new job as Canada’s top diplomat, but in case anyone has forgotten, it’s not the job she was expected to do when she left journalism for politics a few years ago.
On the heels of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s big cabinet shuffle last week, Oxfam has delivered a report that reminds us of the burning issue that brought Freeland into public life: income inequality and the wealth gap.
“Soaring income inequality has become an undeniable political fact,” Freeland wrote in her 2013 best-seller, Plutocrats. According to Oxfam, that gap has been growing since Freeland’s book came out. Here in Canada, the wealth of just two billionaires — David Thomson and Galen Weston Sr. — is equal to that of about 11 million Canadians.
Canadian billionaires aren’t Freeland’s problem these days; a single American billionaire, president-elect Donald Trump, is going to be taking up most of the minister’s time. The irony hasn’t been lost on observers: The author of Plutocrats now has a full-time job managing one of them.
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