Freeland likely to focus on Russia At G7 meeting

Sees Putin as provocateur in ideological clash

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland sees the clash between the forces of democracy and authoritarianism as a defining conflict of our time, and she blames one country that she knows extremely well — Russia.

That world view will form the frame for Freeland and her fellow G7 foreign ministers as they meet Sunday to tackle the security threats imperilling the planet, and she’s placing the disruptive Vladimir Putin at the centre of that picture.

Freeland has made clear recently that Russia — a country she knows well from her previous career as a journalist, and one that has attempted to vilify her — will be her main focus when she hosts G7 foreign ministers in Toronto.

Freeland is convening the meeting as part of the slate of ministerial level gatherings in the run-up to the leaders’ summit Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will host in June in Charlevoix, Que.

Freeland is being paired with Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, who will also host his interior ministry counterparts in Toronto, and where they are expected to focus on combating the continuing threat of terrorism.

In Freeland’s view, the road to building peace and security means confronting “one of the defining debates of our time — which is the debate between democracy and authoritarianism.

“A lot of us thought that debate had been decided in 1989 or 1991,” Freeland told a recent student gathering at the University of Toronto. “But it’s not looking that way so much now. And I think that is very much an issue that is relevant and important for the G7 to take on.”

Freeland is drawing on the sweep of a generation’s worth of history, since the end of the Cold War to the current depths of Russian tensions with the West since it annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula four years ago.

A Ukrainian Canadian who also speaks Russian, Freeland described the formative influence of travelling to Russia as a freelance journalist in the early 1990s and witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union. It launched a journalism career that saw her report from Moscow and Kyiv.

“It’s part of what’s made me foreign minister,” she told the U of T audience. “Actually observing the collapse of the vastest communist regime in the world and then observing the effort to build something in its place has profoundly shaped my thinking, including about this new challenge of democracy versus authoritarianism.”

Canada recently joined its allies in expelling Russian diplomats, after a nerve-gas attack in Britain on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.