Words matter. These are the best Chrystia Freeland Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
There are no bad seats at the cabinet table.
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.
Assad is not the greatest ally to have.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I really believe in hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.
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.
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.
I see social mobility and equality of opportunity as really successful Canadian values.
One thing America gets right is being open to innovation. Canada and Scandinavia have to do better on that.
If you believe in democracy, than you can’t trash it by being cynical about the people who do democracy: the politicians.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s good to be good at playing defence, but the best defence is a strong offence.
In a globalized economy, jobs no longer need a passport, but workers do.
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.
Sometimes who is going to be taking care of all of my kids on any given day is more complicated than any trade agreement.
People don’t just want to be rich and successful, they want to be good.
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.
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.
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.
My respect for politicians has increased. It’s hard work – even hard physical work.
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.
I have always liked hanging out with people and talking to people.
Fancy GPS systems and space-age tractors are what most excite the farmers I know and astound their city friends.
Social media now make it easier to organize protest movements, even – or perhaps especially – in authoritarian regimes.
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.
A thing that really troubles me about a more polarized society is that you stop having a sense of society and citizenship.
Plutocrats worldwide have readily understood the advantages of evading the burdens of the nation-state.
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.
I cut my teeth as a journalist writing about societies that didn’t have democracy.
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.
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.
