Chrystia Freeland

I was booted out of Reuters long before the Chrystia Freeland invasion, and my only experience of her were her appearances on various US talk shows including Real Time with Bill Maher, during which I felt she put a poor face on Reuters, resorting to bobble-headed nodding assents to what others were saying and delivering no insight or foresight of her own.

However it is a total cop-out for her to justify the closing of the Toronto “middle class” operation and its outsourcing to India by saying: “Ever since I’ve been an editor at different news organizations, legacy newsrooms have been shrinking, and that was something that happened as well when I was at Reuters. That shrinkage started before I got there and has continued. We know that is something that’s happening to the news business,” [Chrystia Freeland in the rough and tumble of Toronto politics].

This happened under her watch, and if she had any principles to justify her currently trumpeted position as champion of the middle class, then she should have resigned forthwith rather than seeing this shrinkage executed.

It is indeed disturbing to read that few of the former Reuters employees wanted to comment on the record for fear that criticising the well-connected Freeland could hurt their employment prospects in a shrinking media industry.

I still keep in contact with many former Reuters colleagues in New York and I have rarely found such unanimity in damning an individual without any mitigating addenda as with Freeland during her “breeze through” Reuters, including the claim that it was her connections which secured her recruitment in the first place.

As one former colleague commented on learning that she was running in an apparently safe seat in Toronto: “Poor Canada!” ■