Chrystia Freeland Quotes

We are very proud, wherever we are in the world, to tell you about Canadian values and what we think is the right thing for Canada to do. And when it comes to refugees, we very much believe in welcoming refugees to our country, and that includes Syrian refugees, and that includes Muslim refugees.

- Chrystia Freeland

The challenge of weaning ourselves off fossil fuel even as it becomes more abundant will make the old fights about energy conservation seem like child's play.

- Chrystia Freeland

Fancy GPS systems and space-age tractors are what most excite the farmers I know and astound their city friends.

- Chrystia Freeland

Social media now make it easier to organize protest movements, even - or perhaps especially - in authoritarian regimes.

- Chrystia Freeland

The one source of criticism even the most repressive authoritarian leader cannot silence is the outside world. Autocrats are usually thin-skinned and like to be admired, so at least, at first, they often seek to be praised abroad.

- Chrystia Freeland

I see real opportunities for us to have stronger, closer collaboration between the three North American partners and seize on opportunities to achieve objectives of more jobs and growth.

- Chrystia Freeland

Executive pay has skyrocketed for many reasons - including the prevalence of overly cozy boards and changing cultural norms about pay - but increasing scale, competition, and innovation have all played major roles.

- Chrystia Freeland

The main point of democracy is to deliver positive results for the majority.

- Chrystia Freeland

Motherhood may be a 'killer' when it comes to becoming a Master of the Universe, but among middle-class mothers, even after that touch of baby's lips to bosom, a big and growing number find themselves able - and often required - to bring home the family bacon.

- Chrystia Freeland

The high-tech, globalized capitalism of the 21st century is very different from the postwar version of capitalism that performed so magnificently for the middle classes of the Western world.

- Chrystia Freeland

Twitter-lutionaries are good at toppling regimes, but in the Mideast and North Africa, they're losing out to the Islamists, who've built protest movements the old-fashioned way. And in Moscow, the Mink revolutionaries, who are united by Live-Journal but not much else, were easy for Putin to outmaneuver.

- Chrystia Freeland

I interviewed Putin himself in 2000, shortly after he took over as president.

- Chrystia Freeland

It's public knowledge that there have been efforts - as U.S. intelligence sources have said - by Russia to destabilize the U.S. political system. I think that Canadians and, indeed, other Western countries should be prepared for similar efforts to be directed at us.

- Chrystia Freeland

Plutocrats were the chief beneficiaries of so-called neoliberalism and the suite of political changes it brought beginning in the late 1970s - deregulation, weaker protection for unions, the shareholder value movement, and the subsequent inflation of executive compensation.

- Chrystia Freeland

When I was a kid in junior high, I had an assignment to discuss how to rescue poor people in India. I remember my teacher at the time considered it an impossible problem. Now, we're not talking that way anymore. We're sure not talking about that for China. They're rescuing themselves thanks to globalization.

- Chrystia Freeland

The hollowing out of the middle class is a problem common to all Western industrialized economies. Maybe we should work together to solve it.

- Chrystia Freeland

The triumph of economic liberalization has coincided with a sharp increase in income inequality.

- Chrystia Freeland

Environmentally friendly business practices have long been mainstream, particularly when they create a brand advantage, as with organic foods.

- Chrystia Freeland

My late mother moved back to her parents' homeland in the 1990s when Ukraine and Russia, along with the thirteen other former Soviet republics, became independent states. Drawing on her experience as a lawyer in Canada, she served as executive officer of the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, an NGO she helped to found.

- Chrystia Freeland

One of the great, and largely forgotten, triumphs of American society and government has been how smoothly U.S. farmers and their communities negotiated the creative destruction of the early 20th century and emerged triumphant when it was over.

- Chrystia Freeland

Companies and capital operate internationally, often beyond the economic reach of any particular nation-state. People are pretty global, too, living lives that freely cross national borders.

- Chrystia Freeland

Reagan's legacy is so powerful because he identified the state as the central issue in American politics.

- Chrystia Freeland

Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger.

- Chrystia Freeland

Oil could complicate domestic politics in countries with too much of it - there is a reason economists talk about 'the curse of oil,' and dictatorships have thrived in countries with abundant natural resources.

- Chrystia Freeland

I love the Internet. I love my mobile devices. I love the fact that they mean that whoever chooses to will be able to watch this talk far beyond this auditorium.

- Chrystia Freeland

It's good to be good at playing defence, but the best defence is a strong offence.

- Chrystia Freeland

Plutocrats worldwide have readily understood the advantages of evading the burdens of the nation-state.

- Chrystia Freeland

A general charge of crony capitalism is easy to make. But dividing the 'bad' crony capitalists from the 'good' innovative entrepreneurs is much harder to do. And sorting them out without creating a new group of crony capitalists may be the hardest thing of all.

- Chrystia Freeland

I am a very strong supporter of our government's view that it is important to engage with all countries around the world - very much including Russia.

- Chrystia Freeland

If you believe in democracy, the overreach of leaders is a good reminder that vigorous public debate and time-consuming due process are not only more fair and more just, but that over the long term they usually produce better government, too.

- Chrystia Freeland

Creating jobs for your country's workers is about much more than ensuring that the balance sheets of your country's companies are strong, or stimulating domestic demand. It is about figuring out how your country's workers fit into the global economy.

- Chrystia Freeland

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

- Chrystia Freeland

As income inequality increases, the social and political sway of those at the very, very top grows, too. They are nearly all men, and men whose lived experience tells them that women, for whatever reason, just don't have what it takes.

- Chrystia Freeland

When you think of technological revolution, you probably think of geeks in cool coastal spaces like the Google campus, or perhaps of math wizards on Wall Street. But one source of rural prosperity is the adoption of radical new technologies - and a consequent surge in productivity.

- Chrystia Freeland

The tragedy of 9/11 and the bloody scrambling-up of the Middle East were painful reminders that the world had not yet reached any end-of-history ideal. But these events mattered less to the assumptions and strategies of huge multinational companies than one might guess.

- Chrystia Freeland

The age of economic relations as the primary arena for interactions between states is already upon us.

- Chrystia Freeland

Urbanites may picture farmers as hip heritage-pig breeders returning to the land, or a struggling rural underclass waging a doomed battle to hang on to their patrimony as agribusiness moves in. But these stereotypes are misleading.

- Chrystia Freeland

Thanks to globalization and the technology revolution, the nature of work, the distribution of the rewards from that work, and maybe even the economic cycle itself are being transformed.

- Chrystia Freeland

This notion that borders wouldn't matter, that we would have commonality of interests around the world. Well, guess who got there first? The plutocrats.

- Chrystia Freeland

This is the 21st-century paradox: Even as political democracy has become the intellectual default mode for much of the world, the private sector usually trumps the public one when it comes to accommodating consumer choice.

- Chrystia Freeland

Our culture is a very diverse one, and I think now it is incredibly dangerous and very wrong to persecute Muslims and say there is something wrong with being a Muslim.

- Chrystia Freeland

Defending human rights should be an important objective of foreign policy, and that, too, will sometimes be hard to reconcile with an economic agenda, especially when it comes to dealing with rich but repressive players like China and Russia.

- Chrystia Freeland

Shipping middle-class jobs to China, or hollowing them out with machines, is a win for smart managers and their shareholders. We call the result higher productivity. But, looked at through the lens of middle-class jobs, it is a loss.

- Chrystia Freeland

My mother was born in a refugee camp in Germany before the family immigrated to western Canada. They were able to get visas thanks to my grandfather's older sister, who had immigrated between the wars.

- Chrystia Freeland

All of us can agree that we want government to work as well as possible, and we should all applaud efforts to improve it. But there is no escaping the divisive and essential questions: What is the purpose of the state, and whom does it serve?

- Chrystia Freeland

A thing that really troubles me about a more polarized society is that you stop having a sense of society and citizenship.

- Chrystia Freeland

Most of the conversation about how geopolitics is changing in the 21st century focuses on the shift from west to east and on how we're moving from the bipolar power equation of the Cold War to a new bipolar relationship, that of the U.S. and China, that determines the mood music for everyone else.

- Chrystia Freeland

If the Tea Party gets its way, there will be less government - which is great for the elites. They don't need the government.

- Chrystia Freeland

What is interesting is that, although it is framed as a war between the elites and Main Street, the Tea Party is actually really good for the elites.

- Chrystia Freeland

Individual nations have offered their own contributions to income inequality - financial deregulation and upper-bracket tax cuts in the United States; insider privatization in Russia; rent-seeking in regulated industries in India and Mexico.

- Chrystia Freeland

Our battle over the size of the state overlooks a problem that is just as important and that may be easier to muster the collective will to resolve: how effective government is, regardless of its scale.

- Chrystia Freeland

If you doubt that we live in a winner-take-all economy and that education is the trump card, consider the vast amounts the affluent spend to teach their offspring.

- Chrystia Freeland

There are no bad seats at the cabinet table.

- Chrystia Freeland

One consequence of Russia's klepto-capitalist model is the growing appeal of government jobs, with their lucrative opportunities for payoffs.

- Chrystia Freeland

The hollowing out of the middle class. That's not just about capitalism or the structure of taxation. That is also about the fundamental truth that machines can do a lot of things better than humans used to do. A lot of those people are being pushed down to do less value-adding jobs, so they get paid less money.

- Chrystia Freeland

The economic reality is that, thanks to smart machines and global trade, the well-paying, middle-class jobs that were the backbone of Western democracies are vanishing.

- Chrystia Freeland

Western investment is usually assumed to walk hand-in-hand with the democratic values of its home countries, and indeed, opening an economy to outside money is one of the textbook steps in a shift from authoritarianism to an open society.

- Chrystia Freeland

Especially among journalists, politics is not a pursuit that's held in high esteem. We tend to be cynical about it - but I actually believe in democracy.

- Chrystia Freeland

If you believe in democracy, than you can't trash it by being cynical about the people who do democracy: the politicians.

- Chrystia Freeland

Corporations are not employment agencies, and judging them by that metric is a mistake.

- Chrystia Freeland

Sprawling, earnest, and ambitious - its modest title is 'The Future' - Al Gore's new book embodies both the virtues and the flaws of its author. But those hardy souls who slog past the weaknesses will be rewarded by a book that is brave, original and often fun.

- Chrystia Freeland

Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic.

- Chrystia Freeland

In Western capitalism circa 2013, fear that the market economy has become dysfunctional is not limited to a few entrepreneurs in Boulder. It is being publicly expressed, with increasing frequency, by some of the people who occupy the commanding heights of the global economy.

- Chrystia Freeland

I think Obama and the economists around him have a very sophisticated understanding of both globalization and the technology revolution and the impact they're having on the world economy and they way they're creating these winner-take-all spirals.

- Chrystia Freeland

TED is certainly a gathering of an incredibly eclectic, incredibly interesting community, but it's also an elite community - at least an important portion comes from that global 1%.

- Chrystia Freeland

As companies become bigger, the global environment more competitive, and the rate of disruptive technological innovation ever faster, the value to shareholders of attracting the best possible CEO increases correspondingly.

- Chrystia Freeland

I cut my teeth as a journalist writing about societies that didn't have democracy.

- Chrystia Freeland

Living as we do in the age of Facebook, we shouldn't be surprised that some countries are starting to imagine themselves more as social networks than as a physical place.

- Chrystia Freeland

Sometimes, the aftermath is more devastating than the storm. That is the story of the 2008 financial crisis. It was disastrous at the time, but what has been worse is how long it has lingered.

- Chrystia Freeland

Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth.

- Chrystia Freeland

Income inequality is one thing, but a permanent division into the haves and have-nots is an entirely different thing - and much less acceptable.

- Chrystia Freeland

The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice's oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.

- Chrystia Freeland

I really believe in hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.

- Chrystia Freeland

This globalization is lifting up hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The Left needs to see that.

- Chrystia Freeland

I have always liked hanging out with people and talking to people.

- Chrystia Freeland

The progressives like to talk a lot about poverty - and you should. However, it's the guys in the middle who have really been hurt by the global economy . The people at the bottom have been holding on to their jobs quite well, actually.

- Chrystia Freeland

We recognize that NAFTA is a three-country agreement, and we need a three-country negotiation.

- Chrystia Freeland

When Canada works to counter extremism and terrorism, particularly in the Middle East, Israel is always a natural partner and a close ally.

- Chrystia Freeland

Assad is not the greatest ally to have.

- Chrystia Freeland

The chief job of foreign policy today is helping to figure out the rules for the global economy and defending each nation's interests within it.

- Chrystia Freeland

It was surprising to me to hear a member question whether another member of the House was an adult. We're all adults in the House of Commons, and I think it diminishes us all to suggest otherwise.

- Chrystia Freeland

It's important to remember that, in the 1930s, a lot of people in the West looked at communism as a pretty good idea. That was partly because they didn't know how bad things were on the communist side of the world, but it was also partly because things were bad in the West.

- Chrystia Freeland

We in Canada are not going to say Muslims are worse than Christians or are worse than Jews or are worse than atheists.

- Chrystia Freeland

We are all living in a world shaped by Reagan and his ideology of small 'l' liberalism.

- Chrystia Freeland

In a globalized economy, jobs no longer need a passport, but workers do.

- Chrystia Freeland

My respect for politicians has increased. It's hard work - even hard physical work.

- Chrystia Freeland

I lived in Moscow for four years and really, really enjoyed it, and I have a really deep love for the Russian language and Russian culture.

- Chrystia Freeland

Slavery is America's original sin and was the great global injustice of that age.

- Chrystia Freeland

Worrying about the poor is one thing. To contend that equality is necessary for growth is an altogether different and more radical idea.

- Chrystia Freeland

Sometimes who is going to be taking care of all of my kids on any given day is more complicated than any trade agreement.

- Chrystia Freeland

In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult.

- Chrystia Freeland

I think of myself as a Russophile. I speak the language and studied the nation's literature and history in college.

- Chrystia Freeland

In America, we have equated personal business success with public virtue.

- Chrystia Freeland

One of the most important political and economic facts of this young century is that capital has been slipping the traces of the nation-state. Business is global; government is national.

- Chrystia Freeland

If you've developed an ideology that what's good for you personally also happens to be good for everyone else, that's quite wonderful because there's no moral tension.

- Chrystia Freeland

I see social mobility and equality of opportunity as really successful Canadian values.

- Chrystia Freeland

I know Russia well.

- Chrystia Freeland

One thing America gets right is being open to innovation. Canada and Scandinavia have to do better on that.

- Chrystia Freeland