Dear editor,
Re: Mike Grinsell letter - Is Poilievre any worse than what we have now? May 1 Record)
I’d like to say that I am also (maybe for different reasons) not a supporter of our current prime minister and am undecided as to how I will vote in the next federal election.
That said, there are some comments made I must address.
Mr. Grinsall suggests that Justin Trudeau’s education and work experience do not qualify him to be prime minister and additionally declares that deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland is “equally unqualified.”
In fact, Pierre Poilievre and Justin Trudeau have followed remarkably similar and uneventful routes into public life. Both graduated with bachelor’s degrees from Canadian universities after which Poilievre immediately went on to work with the Alliance/Conservative party in Alberta while Trudeau taught high school in Vancouver for a few years. Both were elected to Parliament around the same time: Poilievre in 2004 and Trudeau in 2008. Nothing in their pasts would indicate that one is more qualified than the other to be prime minister.
But interestingly, the “equally unqualified” Chrystia Freeland leaves them both in the dust.
After graduating from Harvard she attended Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, became a financial journalist writing for the Washington Post and the Economist, served as deputy editor of both the Globe and Mail in Toronto and the Financial Times of London and authored an internationally best-selling book (The Plutocrats), which won the National Business Book award for 2013. She was elected to parliament in 2013, and served as Minister of International Trade where she negotiated the highly successful free trade treaty (CETA) with the European Union. While serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs she was selected in 2018 as Policy Diplomat of the Year by the Foreign Policy Institute in Washington DC.
Yet, despite her wealth of education and experience, many of the media and the public persist in declaring her “unqualified” to be minister of finance. Could this have something to do with her being a woman?
Erik Taynen,
Courtenay