We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon
Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.
Chrystia Freeland is married to Graham Bowley, a British writer and reporter for The New York Times.The couple has three children.She has lived in Toronto since the summer of 2013 when she returned from abroad to run for election.She speaks Ukrainian at home with her children. She also speaks English, Russian, Italian, and French. In 2014, John Geddes reported that Freeland and her sister co-owned an apartment overlooking the central square of Kyiv, Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Freeland also owns properties in London in the United Kingdom.
Freeland'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. Her paternal grandmother, Helen Caulfield, was a World War II war bride from Glasgow. 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 (Ukrainian: Anglicized as Michael Chomiak), born in Stroniatyn, Galicia, and Alexandra Loban, originally of Rudniki, near Stanislaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk).
Freeland's maternal grandfather, Michael Chomiak, 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 daily newspaper Krakivs'ki Visti (Kraków News) for the Nazi regime. 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 Nazi propaganda against Jews.
NAZI Connection
In 2017, when Russian-affiliated websites, such as Russia Insider and New Cold War, 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. Her office later denied Chomiak ever collaborated with Nazi Germany; 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.
