Chrystia Freeland

Christina Alexandra Freeland PC MP (born August 2, 1968)

in Peace River, Alberta, on August 2, 1968. Her father, Donald Freeland, was a farmer and lawyer and a member of the Liberal Party, and her Ukrainian mother, Halyna Chomiak (1946–2007), was also a lawyer, and ran for the New Democratic Party (NDP) in Edmonton Strathcona in the 1988 federal election. Her paternal grandmother was a Scottish war bride. Freeland's parents divorced when she was nine years old, though she continued to live with both of them.

Freeland was an activist from a young age, organizing a strike in fifth grade to protest her school's exclusive enrichment classes. She attended Old Scona Academic High School in Edmonton, Alberta for two years before attending the United World College of the Adriatic, in Italy, on a merit scholarship from the Alberta government for a project that sought to promote international peace and understanding.

She studied Russian history and literature at Harvard University. During 1988–89, she was an exchange student at the University of Kyiv in Ukraine, where she studied Ukrainian, although she was already fluent in the language. While there, she worked with journalist Bill Keller of The New York Times to document the Bykivnia graves, an unmarked mass grave site where the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) disposed of tens of thousands of dissidents. The official Soviet story held that the graves were the result of Nazi atrocities. She translated the stories of locals who had witnessed covered trucks and "puddles of blood in the road" that predated the Nazi invasion, adding evidence that the site was actually the result of Stalinist repression.

While there she attracted the attention of the KGB, which tagged her with the code name "Frida", and Soviet newspapers, who attacked her as a foreigner meddling in their internal affairs over her contacts with Ukrainian activists. The KGB surveilled Freeland and tapped her phone calls, and documented the young Canadian activist delivering money, video and audio recording equipment, and a personal computer to contacts in Ukraine. She used a diplomat at the Canadian embassy in Moscow to send material abroad in a secret diplomatic pouch, worked with foreign journalists on stories about life in the Soviet Union, and organised marches and rallies to attract attention and support from western countries. On her return from a trip to London in March 1989, Freeland was denied re-entry to the USSR. By the time her activism within Ukraine came to an end, Freeland had become the subject of a high-level case study from the KGB on how much damage a single determined individual could inflict on the Soviet Union; a 2021 Globe and Mail article quoted the report by a former officer of the KGB, which had described Freeland as "a remarkable individual", "erudite, sociable, persistent, and inventive in achieving her goals".

She worked as an intern for United Press International in London in the summer of 1990. Afterwards, she completed a Master of Studies degree in Slavonic studies from the University of Oxford in 1993 having studied at St Antony's College as a Rhodes Scholar.

Freeland is married to Graham Bowley, a British writer and reporter for The New York Times. The couple have 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 Independence square in Kyiv.