Did Chrystia Freeland just commit Canada to Russian regime change?
Christia Freeland is willing to fight the Russians on behalf of the Ukrainians, right down to the last Canadian and Ukrainian.
Her family history requires it.
en.wikipedia.org
Family and personal lifeFreeland's paternal grandfather, Wilbur Freeland, was a farmer and lawyer who rode in the annual Calgary Stampede; his sister, Beulah, was the wife of a federal member of Parliament, Ged Baldwin. [79] Her paternal grandmother, Helen Caulfield, was a WWII war bride from Glasgow. [80]
Freeland's mother, Halyna Chomiak, was born at a hospital administered by the US Army; her parents were staying at the displaced persons camp at the spa resort in Bad Wörishofen in Bavaria, Germany. Halyna's Ukrainian Catholic parents were Mykhailo Khomiak (anglicized as Michael Chomiak), born in Stroniatyn [ Wikidata], Galicia, and Alexandra Loban, originally of Rudniki, near Stanislaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk). [20] [81] Freeland, who grew up in Alberta, saw "first-hand" the consequences of " democratic backsliding" in Eastern Europe. [82]
Freeland's maternal grandfather, Michael Chomiak (Ukrainian: ??????? ?????, Mykhailo Khomiak), had been a journalist before World War II. During the war in Nazi-occupied Poland and later in Nazi-occupied Austria he was chief editor of the Ukrainian antisemitic daily newspaper Krakivs'ki visti (News of Krakow) for the Nazi regime. [83] After Chomiak's death in 1984, John-Paul Himka, a professor of history at the University of Alberta, who was Chomiak's son-in-law (and also Freeland's uncle by marriage), used Chomiak's records, including old issues of the newspaper, as the basis of several scholarly papers focused on the coverage of Soviet mass-murders of Ukrainian civilians. These papers also examined the use of these massacres as propaganda against Jews. [84] [85] [86] In 2017, when Russian-affiliated websites[ which?] further publicized Chomiak's connection to Nazism, Freeland and her spokespeople responded by claiming that this was a Russian disinformation campaign during her appointment to the position of minister of foreign affairs. [87] [88] [89] [90] [83] Her office later denied Chomiak ever collaborated with the Nazi Germany. [91] However, reporting by The Globe and Mail showed that Freeland had known of her grandfather's Nazi ties since at least 1996, when she helped edit a scholarly article by Himka for the Journal of Ukrainian Studies. [87]
Freeland is married to Graham Bowley, a British writer and reporter for The New York Times. [92] [93] The couple have three children. [94]
She has lived in Toronto since the summer of 2013 when she returned from abroad to run for election. [28] [95] [35] She speaks Ukrainian at home with her children. [96] She also speaks English, Russian, Italian, and French. [97] In 2014, John Geddes reported that Freeland and her sister co-owned an apartment overlooking Independence square in Kyiv. [98] |
