Freeland has been very well-behaved. That may be why she loses.

Mark Carney already cost Chrystia Freeland one job. She's on track to let him do it again. Will she turn things around?

Two months ago, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke at a gala for an organization whose mission is supposedly to elect more women to office in Canada. He lamented America's second rejection of its first female president. Fast forward to today, as Trudeau himself is set to be replaced as Liberal leader and Prime Minister by an unelected man - Mark Carney, a wealthy former banker who has never held elected office.

So, despite a decade of the Liberal party's gender quota policies, the question remains: why has the Liberal Party never been led by a woman?

The answer best lies within the story of Chrystia Freeland.

Last week, the former Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, now vying for Trudeau's gig, tweeted, "Well-behaved women rarely make history"—a line from historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The quote isn't wrong. Disrupting the status quo is non-negotiable for anyone—man or woman— seeking to affect political change. But Freeland's not-so-subtle assertion that she's been anything but a model of compliance within her party rings hollow.

During her decade in cabinet and during the leadership race, Freeland has always publicly toed the Trudeau Prime Minister's Office party line, no matter how banal it was. After over a decade in office, there are precisely zero examples of her publicly pushing back against her party. Even her decision to leave the cabinet was largely uncritical of the government, and only came after Trudeau removed her from the Finance post.

And that reticence to publicly hold the men up her food chain to account in crucial moments is precisely why she's now stumbling in a leadership race that, by any measure, she should've owned. This week’s Liberal leadership debates are no different: will she finally put her elbows up and contrast Carney in a smart, savvy way?

For many, the answer to that is unclear. Given Freeland's prominence in Trudeau's cabinet and the Liberal Party's long history of gender quotas, many observers expected her to be a highly competitive front-runner for the top job. Over the course of a decade, she had every opportunity to advance her own policy agenda and build a political organization that could have all but cemented her role as successor. But other indicators suggest that's not the case. Last week, it was revealed that Freeland raised far less money than two other candidates in the Liberal leadership race. Her lacklustre fundraising follows weeks of running a campaign from the low ground beneath front-runner Mark Carney that has been about as inspiring as a day-old plate of cold, plain spaghetti.

However, Freeland's campaign struggles—and the Liberal establishment's apparent preference for a male saviour figure—are more than a personal setback and an indictment of her unwillingness to exert some independent political will. If left unexplained, her lacklustre campaign risks reinforcing a narrative that women aren't capable of securing the top federal political position in Canada.

To be fair to Freeland, that explanation doesn't solely rest with her actions. Taking a critical look at her performance doesn't absolve Trudeau and his team (who now surrounds Freeland's rival, Mark Carney) for their track record of tokenizing women—valuing them when obedient and dumping them when they are not. But women in the Liberal party, who, like Freeland, have willingly placed themselves in the orbit of these men have had a duty to recognize this and to outfox them - or, at least, make a valiant attempt to do so. Few have succeeded in this task, and to date, Chrystia Freeland isn't one of them.

Carney and his team (aka the Artist Formerly Known As Team Trudeau) are trying hard to have Canadians dismiss Freeland's flat leadership bid as another sad footnote for women in Canadian politics. If she wants to avoid this fate - or frankly any future female Prime Ministerial hopeful, too - she needs to quickly come to terms with some hard truths about seeking power. Freeland’s political survival may depend on mastering these lessons before the Liberal leadership debate.

Lesson 1: Being mindlessly compliant is an inherently stupid political strategy.

The innermost sanctum of the Liberal Party - people like Trudeau and his tiny circle of senior advisors who are now backing Carney - have long enforced a culture of total obeisance from Liberal caucus members. They even went as far as to neuter both their caucus and their party membership's ability to trigger a leadership review. There are virtually no examples of any Liberal caucus members who intended to reoffer in a subsequent election publicly demanding accountability from Trudeau or his cabinet for scandals or poor public policy decisions.

In that, Freeland has been the model of perfection for showcasing how obeisance was the top criterion - outside of gender quota - for advancement within Trudeau's cabinet. Said differently, if a Liberal MP didn't adequately demonstrate the willingness to be unquestioningly compliant with any decisions made by Trudeau and his top staff - many of whom are presently running Mark Carney's campaign, they wouldn't advance or suffer more terminal political fates. Freeland has excelled in this quality.

Proof of this reality abounds, be it in Trudeau's expulsion of Jody Wilson Reybould and Jane Philpott from caucus when they spoke out in the midst of the SNC-Lavalin crisis, or in his minister's slavish adherence to ineffectual policy positions and unwillingness to speak out against scandal within the party tent. Also, it's probably the main reason why Trudeau was able to hang on as leader as long as he did, given the mountain of scandal and failure he amassed while in office: he was only really pushed to resign after he made his last cabinet shuffle and his caucus realized that holding water for him wouldn't result in a ministerial car and driver.

And so to Freeland, who had multiple opportunities to publicly demand accountability on many of the negative issues that plagued the Liberal party over the last decade but chose not to. At every turn, for over a decade, if there was a scandal or a bad public policy decision (e.g. recent capital gains tax changes), Freeland could be counted upon to deliver her now-famous word salad of inanities as opposed to delivering something that would have forced better behaviour from her party leader and the people that surrounded him.

This unwillingness to publicly criticize her party - even gently and constructively - suggests to the average person that she was either completely supportive of the path that team Trudeau/Carney (in his role as the Liberal’s economic advisor) were on, or cared more about keeping her cabinet job than bothering to push back. In the end, as Trudeau's Deputy, she should have herself as the one with the most responsibility to constructively challenge him and question his decisions - including the appointment of Carney to senior advisory roles while he held intersecting related private sector roles- to force better outcomes.

Her apparent failure to do so benefited no one. The general public is now stuck with the results of their decade of poor decision-making and scandal. Trudeau's unchallenged idiocy cost him his job. As Deputy, she left the Liberal caucus without a champion for their issues. But she also failed herself, stepping into the impossible situation of now trying to claim she'd change course on policies she both cheerled and vociferously defended.

If Freeland wants to win now, she needs to push back on the person the people around her former boss are trying to coronate and ensure he takes his lumps for being an active participant in the Trudeau government’s policy making process.

Lesson 2: Don't go to war if you aren't willing to do what it takes to win the battle.

Freeland's inability to fight back and demand accountability from Team Trudeau/Carney leads to a great irony in her leadership campaign. Her campaign slogan is "Join the fight". But given her history of apparent submission to those up her food chain, the question no one seems to have the answer to is, what fight would that be?

If she's going to have any sort of respectable showing in the leadership race, she'd be well advised to quickly figure out the answer to this question. Since the start of the leadership, Freeland hasn't thrown, much less landed, a single political punch on front-runner Carney. Maybe this is due to the culture of heavy-fisted compliance imposed by the Liberal PMO or people telling her that she needs to be nice to him if he wins, but none of that matters in the highest stake fight for her political life.

Hitting back against Carney should be easy (and satisfying) for her, both personally and strategically. For starters, Carney spent the last half decade pretending he was her bestie while covertly angling for her job and setting her up to take the fall for many of the policies he would have advocated for (and profited from) behind the scenes and his formal advisory roles to Trudeau and his cabinet. She reportedly discovered he had been offered - and was likely to take - her job when Trudeau fired her from the Finance role over a Zoom meeting. If that level of duplicity isn't enough to muster sufficient amounts of righteous indignation to provoke her taking at least a couple of proverbial swings at the guy, then how the hell is anyone supposed to believe that she would fight for Canadians on other issues?

From a tactical perspective, there are a million ways that Freeland could be contrasting Carney as the Trudeau continuity candidate when change is desperately needed. For example, by Freeland's admission, Carney has been the backroom driver of many of the Trudeau government's disastrous economic policies. He's done so from a sketchy perch in the most senior roles of some of the biggest corporations on the planet, outside of the bounds of a federal ethics screening. He's also imported virtually all of Trudeau's cabinet and senior staff onto his team. He's done all this while making the preposterous claim that he's an outsider. And given that he's a political neophyte, she should be able to make all these points while running circles around him. But again, crickets.

The only logical explanation for her failure to do so is that Freeland has already resigned herself to her defeat and hopes to placate Carney and his cabal once they complete the machinations of his coronation. This would be a completely boneheaded move on her part. From an altruistic perspective, the Liberal party is so rotten and bereft of connection to the general public, particularly with younger Canadians, that someone needs to vet him for the party to survive long term. The legacy media don't seem willing to do so, so she must.

But from a personal lens, the man and his team had already orchestrated her demotion out of the cabinet and have done everything they could to encourage her to drop out of the race. They sure as hell don't seem to give a rip about her personal well-being, and they're unlikely to view her as anything other than a spent force if she can't even be bothered to throw a punch in the middle of a political battle. And most importantly, they're unlikely to truly ever trust her again after she stuck the knife into Trudeau for them.

On that note, Team Trudeau/Carney would also have observed the method by which she chose to go all Brutus on Trudeau with bemused mirth. Following a Zoom call between her and Trudeau, who had informed her three days prior that he was demoting her out of the finance ministry into a more junior role in favour of Carney, she lobbed a grenade into her caucus and quit via a tweet on the day she was slated to deliver the Liberal's 2024 fall economic statement.

For those who point to this move as a true act of political rebellion, her timing in pulling the pin is suspect. She waited until after being told she was losing the Finance portfolio to make her move and then only offered muddled and unfocused statements in the following days. In allowing Trudeau to turf her as opposed to leaving before he was able to, the Trudeau/Carney camp was able to - through media leaks and well-placed stories - frame her departure as a result of sour grapes from being demoted and selfish leadership aspirations as opposed to an act of morally just political courage.

If Freeland had wanted to go to war at the time of that fateful Zoom call, she could done any number of things to immediately take the high ground. She could have convinced Trudeau that she had accepted his decision and then walked into the House of Commons days later and pinned every crappy line item in the Fall Economic Statement on him and Carney. She could have immediately launched her leadership campaign by framing the ballot question as a choice between a courageous woman who quit out of principle and two men who were the architects of the greatest economic failings in Canadian history.

But alas, no such jam was in the offing.

Freeland's moves in the aftermath of her resignation have seemed unsure and tepid, like something one would expect from a political naïf as opposed to one of the supposed most powerful women in Canadian politics. Since her departure from cabinet, Freeland has acted almost as if she was unsure of what to do once the shackles of the PMO's issues managers were off of her. She has had trouble delivering a consistent narrative about her departure, her leadership opponents, why she's running for the top job, and why she's best suited to win.

Her communications feel somewhere between an expectation that the party's leadership will be gifted to her, that she's resigned herself to losing the race, or that somehow she'll wake up as Finance minister with the last two months have all been a bad dream. Given how Team Carney executed the lead-up to Trudeau's ouster and their hand in her demotion, she should understand by now that power is taken, not given. If she wants it, she has to do what it takes to win. If she wants to lose everything, she should keep on the same course.

Freeland now only has a week or so to turn her campaign around. If she wants a chance of even coming in second place, she must spend every day contrasting herself with Carney and defining and vetting his record. Next week's debates will provide her with an opportunity to brand her opponents and define herself. And she shouldn't kid herself: her opponents will be doing the exact same thing to her, overtly or not.

Mark Carney is certainly not pulling his punches with her. For weeks now, strategically leaked polls showing him as the front-runner, and endless left-learning legacy media focus on his events as opposed to hers suggest that his camp has employed an active strategy of demoralization to defeat her. Carney will use the debate to create content to ensure there is no possible way she- or her fellow also-rans - can pull off a last-minute upset. They all must be ready for it.

And even if she doesn't win, putting up a serious fight against Carney would demonstrate through her actions that Freeland has some modicum of the political intestinal fortitude necessary to survive and inspire in the microwave of the most senior levels of Canadian politics. That's something her contemporaries would love to remember her for.

Lesson #3: No one is irreplaceable.

In politics, nothing spells disaster quite like convincing yourself that you're irreplaceable. It's a sure path to arrogance, irritation of caucus colleagues, out-of-touchness with constituents, bad communications, and poor public policy decisions.

It was long apparent that Freeland had clearly fallen into that trap.

To her credit, it's easy to see why. The Trudeau Liberals' lore still echoes with tales of Team Trudeau's 2012-ish crusade to recruit Freeland—a darling of Canada's left-leaning legacy media and a familiar face on American newstalk shows, where she championed farther-left economic policies that Trudeau's government later embraced. Her 2013 byelection win injected star power into a Liberal Party that was then languishing in third place, augmenting Trudeau's brand and fueling momentum.

From there, Freeland's rise within the Liberal party was nothing short of meteoric: Minister of International Trade, then Foreign Affairs. A hiccup came in 2019 when she lost the latter role to François-Philippe Champagne, being offered the ill-defined Deputy Prime Minister role as a consolation. She should have sensed trouble then - being offered a high-viz cabinet portfolio by Team Trudeau with a lot of perceived responsibility but less real authority should have raised alarm bells for her about how the bosses saw her function in the team.

However, the real storm hit when Freeland took over Finance after former Minister Bill Morneau's ouster amid Trudeau's WE charity scandal. Morneau's exit—allegedly due to his reluctance to engage in Trudeau's drunkenly gratuitous pandemic spending and a desire to pin the WE scandal on someone other than Trudeau—should have been a warning to her about how Trudeau viewed the duties and utility of occupant of the job.

Freeland didn't appear to heed it.

Had Freeland accepted early on that any role in politics is at best fleeting and has to be constantly re-earned and defended, she might have developed an approach to her career that would have given it more resilience (and made better public policy decisions, to boot). Instead, she unquestioningly delivered Trudeau's budgets that doubled Canada's debt, unleashed soaring inflation, and defended his scandals. It was a no-lose gamble for Trudeau: Freeland's success would burnish his image; her failure would make her the scapegoat. As inflation and stagnation gripped the nation and Trudeau's polls tanked in 2023, Freeland should have seen the necessity for an escape hatch -policy or otherwise- from the economic wreckage she helped create.

Astonishingly, Freeland didn't—or couldn't—see her Finance demotion coming.

The inner sanctum of Team Trudeau and Carney may have had their moments of irritation with one another, but make no mistake, they are interchangeable and have held a decade-long, iron-fisted grip over the Liberal party. As much as she might have thought herself irreplaceable to them, Freeland was never part of that innermost circle. So by last summer, the Trudeau-Carney cabal was openly signalling to Ottawa's press gallery about their plan to swap her for Carney, a move to offload public ire onto her as they showed her the door.

Meanwhile, Mark Carney kept a shrewd political distance, counselling Trudeau and Freeland from a lucrative private-sector roost while keeping formal economic advisor ties within the Prime Minister's Office. His decade-long dance—flirting with public life, then pulling back all the while making mega-bank in the corporate world—hints he knew that catching blame for the Liberal's inflationary splurge (despite his own hand in it) could tank his eventual shot at the top job. So he let Freeland bask in the spotlight for many years, even persuading her, by her own account, that he was a trusted ally. Likely mistakenly thinking she was indispensable to the Liberal movement, Freeland bought into Carney's ministrations and publicly praised him, never once publicly signalling that she knew he might be after her job or that Trudeau might actually dispose of her.

And even as numerous PMO leaks led to stories predicting her demise, and even after Trudeau handcuffed her to Carney by planting him in an even more prominent economic role, Freeland still remained deferent to the PMO, passionately advancing their weakest economic ideas. Only after she was removed from her position (allegedly in favour of Carney) did she suggest that the policies she had long advocated for and defended were deficient - stances she took too late to be received by the public with any degree of credibility.

And so, failing to see that the Trudeau/Carney cabal would absolutely sacrifice her, she allowed them to brand her as a problem and replace her when she had outlived her utility to them, ultimately ceding the high ground to them in the leadership race. Like anyone else, they want her to gloss over their failings, not ask too many questions, and sit back and take the L like a champ.

And that's why she needs to fight for her life this week.

If Freeland doesn't quickly find some desire to upset Carney's apple cart, she risks cementing her legacy in politics as being that of a well-behaved also-ran best known for taking the fall for two men who drove the country's economy into the ground.

So Chrystia, at this week's debates, this fighter hopes you join your own fight.

Giddyup.