Trudeau's deputy was careless in the media
The price of speech in Canadian public policy.
Chrystia Freeland is a successful Canadian politician. She has served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and is now in charge of Canada's budget as well as the 10th Deputy Prime Minister of Canada to Justin Trudeau, the current Prime Minister.
In one of her interviews, when asked about the lives of low-income Canadians, she tried to be sympathetic, but the public viewed her gesture as cynical.
"I personally, as a mother and wife, look carefully at my credit card bill once a month, and last Sunday I said to the kids, 'You're older now. You don't watch Disney anymore. Let's cut that Disney Plus subscription. I believe that I need to take exactly the same approach with the federal government's finances, because that's the money of Canadians," Freeland said to Global News.
As her interview spread around the country and was viewed nearly a million times in just a couple of days, the outrage grew. Perhaps Freeland wanted to show that managing billions of dollars is not so different from running a household. As a result, she was bombarded with a clamor of angry emails and comments on social media.
"This advice is about as wise as boomers telling younger folks if only they skipped the avocado toast then they could afford a house," said one person on the media.
Some commenters felt the minister's attempt to blend in missed the mark, like when Princess Jasmine visited the market in "Aladdin" and encountered a less-royal way of life. The enraged called her "smug," "elitist," "clueless" and "entitled."
Federal government ministers will earn just over CAD 289,000 this year. According to Statistics Canada, the income of the average family, for example, in Nunavut was CAD 82,600.
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