Prime Minister Justin Trudeau mishandled the circumstances leading to Chrystia Freeland’s resignation as finance minister Monday and should step down for the good of the country, say two Liberal MPs on P.E.I.
Freeland told a stunned nation on Monday that Trudeau had planned to replace her as finance minister, but not before she was expected to deliver the fall economic statement in the House of Commons that would reveal the government overshot its spending projections by more than $20 billion.
Malpeque MP Heath MacDonald, who once served as a finance minister in the P.E.I. government, said Freeland was put in a difficult position.
“I can’t imagine being asked or told a couple of days prior to being put on a national stage to address the fall economic statement, that the PM basically has lost confidence in you but expected you to carry on,” he said in an email response to CBC.
Charlottetown MP Sean Casey went so far as to say there was a long-running campaign to undermine Freeland, who was also the deputy prime minister.
The people conducting this campaign are either loyal to Justin Trudeau or to Mark Carney, a special adviser to the prime minister and a former Bank of Canada governor, but, “don’t have the courage to say their names,” Casey said during an interview Tuesday on Island Morning.
