As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on holiday break and reportedly reflecting on his future, his former top adviser Gerald Butts said he could soon be stepping down. Butts, who now works for the think tank Eurasia Group, published an article on Dec. 27 going over the political saga of the last weeks around Chrystia Freeland’s resignation from cabinet and the future of the Liberal Party.
Butts argued against the Liberal caucus anointing Freeland as the new leader after she quit in dramatic fashion on Dec. 16, hours before she was scheduled to deliver the Fall Economic Statement. Freeland publicized her resignation letter to Trudeau, in which she accuses him of using “costly political gimmicks” when the country should be fiscally responsible to prepare for a trade war with the incoming U.
S. administration. Freeland also wrote Trudeau was stripping her of the finance portfolio.
Butts said Freeland’s team now believes she will be thanked with Trudeau’s job after having done the Liberal Party and the a country a “favour by ringing a loud buzzer alarm into the ear of a Prime Minister who was sleepwalking toward electoral oblivion.” “I’m not so sure,” he added. Whereas Freeland attempted to distance herself from Trudeau in her resignation letter, saying they’ve been “at odds” over a number of weeks on how the “best path forward for Canada,” Butts remarked the two politicians’ trajectories have long been closely linked.
“Chrystia Freeland was the fi.
