Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland is at the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit in Davos, where she is in private meetings on Wednesday. “Closed to media,” Freeland’s itinerary states. Freeland, who is on the WEF Board of Trustees, has also suddenly been added to the list of speakers to address the WEF on Thursday, according to True North. So far there has been no official statement released from the deputy prime minister’s office regarding this. The theme of the 2024 WEF summit is 'Rebuilding Trust.' It has not released a list of attendees. Global Affairs Canada did not comment when asked if any other Canadian officials would be attending. .On January 9 Canadian journalist David Menzies was arrested for asking Freeland questions on the sidewalk after an event. Later that week Freeland said the arrest was lawful. .Freeland, also Canada’s finance minister, will be speaking on a panel called 'No Recovery without Trade and Investment,' True North reported from Davos. Included in the set will be Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director-general of the World Trade Organization, Børge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum Geneva, and Valdis Dombrovskis, executive vice-president for an Economy that Works for People and Commissioner for Trade at the European Commission. In 2023 Freeland spoke on a panel titled 'Restoring Security and Peace.' .A decade ago, Freeland appeared to be a staunch WEF critic. Her 2014 book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else exposed the agenda formed by powerful people at international conferences. “The real community life of the twenty-first-century plutocracy occurs on the international conference circuit,” Freeland wrote. “The best-known of these events is the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, invitation to which marks an aspiring plutocrat’s arrival on the international scene.”
