From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

Ex-Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced her resignation from Parliament amid Conservative criticism that she can’t serve Canada while working for a foreign government.

Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland is stepping down from Parliament after being appointed as an adviser in Ukraine.

In a January 5 post on X, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shared the appointment of Freeland as an economic adviser to Ukraine, prompting Freeland to announce her resignation from the Canadian Parliament hours later.

“Today, I appointed Chrystia Freeland @cafreeland as an Advisor on Economic Development,” Zelensky wrote. “Chrystia is highly skilled in these matters and has extensive experience in attracting investment and implementing economic transformations.”

News of her appointment was blasted by Conservatives, who quickly pointed out that Freeland’s position in the Ukrainian government would compromise her work within the Canadian Parliament.

“You cannot serve as a member of Parliament (and collect an MP salary) while working for a foreign government,” Conservative MP Andrew Lawton wrote on X. “It’s that simple.”

Freeland responded to the backlash just hours later, revealing that she plans to resign from Parliament in the coming weeks.

“In accepting this voluntary position, I will be stepping aside from my role as the Prime Minister’s Special Representative for the Reconstruction of Ukraine,” she wrote.

“In the coming weeks, I will also leave my seat in Parliament. I want to thank my constituents for their years of confidence in me. I am so grateful to have been your representative,” Freeland concluded.

Despite serving as a Canadian MP, Freeland’s dedication to Ukraine has played an important role in her career since the beginning of the Ukraine and Russia conflict in 2022. Already, Freeland was serving as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada’s new Special Representative for the Reconstruction of Ukraine.

In May, Freeland was appointed minister of transport and internal trade in Carney’s cabinet after the federal election. Freeland was previously former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s deputy prime minister and finance minister.

However, she resigned from these positions in December 2024 after Trudeau requested her resignation as finance minister.

During her time in power, Freeland was known for her ties to globalist groups and her heavy-handed response to anti-mandate protesters during COVID.

During the 2022 Freedom Convoy to protest ongoing COVID regulations, Freeland froze the bank accounts of Canadians, who donated to the protest without a court order.

Later, hearings revealed that Freeland told fellow cabinet members the Freedom Convoy supporters whose bank accounts were frozen under the Emergencies Act would not be able to access their funds until they first reported to police.

Freeland was also personally commended by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, for working to achieve his globalist goals.

In addition to attending WEF meetings, Freeland is currently a member of the WEF Board of Trustees.

Freeland also touted the WEF’s anti-carbon narrative just days after a “renewable” energy crisis left many Canadians without power during one of 2024’s coldest weeks.

By Garry Clement

This year also reaffirmed Canada’s habit of strategic hesitation. Despite overwhelming evidence and allied action, the federal government continued to delay meaningful steps against hostile foreign actors operating within our borders.

As 2026 starts with high-consequence geopolitical events in Venezuela and Iran, Canada continues to present itself to the world as stable, prosperous, and benign. Yet the defining lesson of this past year is that our perceived strength is increasingly an illusion — a façade sustained by political denial, regulatory weakness, and the monetization of risk.

Across multiple fronts — land ownership, real estate, immigration, organized crime, and national security — the same pattern has repeated itself. Warnings were issued. Evidence accumulated. And Ottawa largely chose inaction.

The result is a country drifting further into vulnerability while congratulating itself on tolerance and openness.

Canada’s economy remains dangerously reliant on sectors that are poorly regulated and easily exploited: real estate, land, natural resources, and mass immigration. Throughout the year, investigative reporting and law enforcement intelligence continued to show how foreign capital — often opaque, sometimes criminal — flows freely into these systems with little resistance.

From farmland acquisitions on Prince Edward Island and the Prairies, to urban real estate markets untethered from domestic incomes, Canada has treated ownership and sovereignty as inconveniences rather than safeguards. Weak beneficial ownership registries and limited enforcement ensure that we often do not know who truly controls critical assets — and, worse, seem uninterested in finding out.

This is not economic growth. It is asset stripping disguised as prosperity.

The most brutal manifestation of these blind spots remains fentanyl. In 2025, Canada further cemented its reputation as a preferred destination for laundering synthetic drug profits. Chinese triads, Mexican cartels, and domestic gangs continue to exploit casinos, shell companies, and real estate — not because they are clever, but because Canada is permissive.

Each overdose death is more than a public health failure. It is a financial crime, a national security issue, and a policy indictment. While peer nations have hardened their anti–money laundering regimes, Canada remains slow, fragmented, and politically cautious — a combination that organized crime understands perfectly.

This year also reaffirmed Canada’s habit of strategic hesitation. Despite overwhelming evidence and allied action, the federal government continued to delay meaningful steps against hostile foreign actors operating within our borders.

Some critics charge that Mark Carney’s Liberals are already seeking to water down the long-delayed foreign agent registry, with fines of as little as $50 for non-compliance, while the government has estimated almost 1,800 entities would be expected to register, with 50 additions every year, if this future law were adhered to.

The failure to decisively confront Iranian regime proxies, foreign influence operations, and transnational criminal networks reflects a broader unwillingness to accept that Canada is no longer insulated by geography or reputation.

Our allies increasingly see Canada not as a leader, but as a weak link.

Perhaps nowhere was short-term thinking more evident than in immigration and education policy. Foreign students have become a financial lifeline for institutions, yet oversight remains inadequate. Education visas increasingly function as labour permits in all but name, feeding industries already plagued by regulatory gaps.

Public safety consequences — including in commercial trucking — are no longer theoretical. Nor are concerns about transnational criminal exploitation of these pathways. Yet the federal response continues to prioritize revenue and labour supply over integrity and enforcement.

These are not isolated failures. They are symptoms of a governing philosophy that treats risk as politically inconvenient and accountability as optional. Critics are dismissed as alarmist. Warnings are reframed as xenophobic. And systemic problems are deferred until they become crises.

Canada has been entrusted with extraordinary abundance — land, resources, institutions, and social cohesion. Over the past year, it has become clearer than ever that we are squandering that inheritance.

A nation can only live on reputation for so long. The erosion visible in 2025 will accelerate unless decisive reforms follow: real transparency in ownership, enforceable anti–money laundering laws, a serious national security posture, and immigration systems rooted in integrity rather than expedience.

Canada does not need to abandon openness. It needs to pair openness with vigilance.

The year behind us should be remembered as a warning. Whether the year ahead becomes a correction — or a collapse — will depend on whether leaders finally choose stewardship over denial.

As former Conservative immigration minister Jason Kenney and Conservative Senate leader Leo Housakos have noted, as reported in The Bureau’s analysis of the information war emerging from the Trump administration’s indictment alleging a Maduro narco-state conspiracy, the events in Venezuela are global in nature, and connect directly to Canadian vulnerabilities to transnational money laundering and lax immigration controls that are strategically leveraged by hostile regimes from Beijing to Tehran and Moscow.

And according to Housakos, due to actions emanating from Central and South American authoritarian regimes, including Venezuela, and ultimately instigated by enemies from Beijing, Tehran and Moscow, the upshot is that Western democracies are now facing hybrid warfare threats unprecedented since the Second World War.

In other words, through the tools of transnational drug mafias, political corruption, disinformation, terror and protest, human trafficking, and weaponized migration, Xi, Putin, and the Iranian clerics are attempting to destabilize our societies, softening our defenses before kinetic warfare, or defeating us from within without firing a shot.

Without urgent and decisive leadership in Canada, and the moral clarity and just force that has been in such lack, the continuity of our nation’s great promise is increasingly in doubt.