Freeland’s ‘Plutocrats’ book showcases her views on taxes, deficits, joblessness
OTTAWA — Justin Trudeau first met Chrystia Freeland at a 2012 Toronto signing for her award-winning book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.
The tome chronicled how globalization and the technology revolution has created a new class of uber-wealthy people, "a nation unto themselves" who wield outsized political clout that has produced economic policies designed to make them ever richer while incomes for everyone else stagnate.
Trudeau was so impressed by it that he spent the next eight months trying to persuade the veteran financial journalist to abandon her job as a managing director at Thomson Reuters and join the Liberal team.
Even before she won a Toronto byelection in the fall of 2013, Trudeau named her to co-chair his economic advisory council, which would be instrumental in crafting the Liberals' winning 2015 election platform.
The book meshed with and helped inform Trudeau's thinking: the need for economic policies that would bolster the middle class and shrink the ever-widening gap between the wealthiest one per cent and everyone else.
And it was reflected in the 2015 platform, which promised a tax cut for middle-income earners and an enhanced child benefit, while hiking taxes on the wealthiest.
With Freeland now the federal finance minister, it's worth revisiting Plutocrats for glimpses into her thinking as she takes charge of plotting Canada's economic recovery in the face of a still-evolving pandemic, double-digit unemployment and a sea of red ink.
Here are some highlights from the book, which offer some insight into her views on deficits, taxes, joblessness and government regulation of the financial sector.
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