Dutch Foreign Minister Halbe Zijlstra and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland
The Dutch Foreign Minister Halbe Zijlstra (lead image, left) resigned his post this week after admitting he had publicly and repeatedly lied that he had met with President Vladimir Putin when he had not done so.

The Dutch press, which initiated the investigation exposing the lie, reports that in his resignation speech to the Dutch parliament Zijlstra confessed "the biggest mistake of my political life...The Netherlands deserves a minister who is above any doubt."

In Canada, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland (right) - appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in January 2017 — has been lying about meeting President Putin when she did not

No Canadian newspaper has investigated Freeland's lying, and she has expanded the lie to meetings with other Russian officials, which also did not happen. The Toronto Globe and Mail, the Ottawa Citizen and the state-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) have also failed to report Zijlstra's resignation for his Putin lie; their editors blocked the Reuters and Bloomberg wire reports, which have been running on Canadian newsroom screens, from appearing in print.

The lie, which Zijlstra started during election campaigning in 2006 in The Netherlands and repeated over the decade following, was compounded because Zijlstra also claimed he had heard Putin say Russia was making territorial claims on Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the Baltic states as part of a "Greater Russia". Putin said nothing of the sort. Neither had the Shell oil company executive, who told Zijlstra what he had heard Putin remark at a meeting with Dutch executives. Zijlstra had fabricated what his source told him in order to exaggerate his importance to Dutch voters, and make the Russian threat he had conjured a vote-winner for himself. In 2006 Zijlstra was elected to the Dutch House of Representatives for the first time. He was re-elected in 2012, and appointed foreign minister in October 2017.

The Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, whose reporting forced the removal of Zijlstra, concluded that Zijlstra's lie "ha[s] exploded in his face... His attempt to reinvent himself as a senior diplomat stranded by a lie [makes him] an ambitious politician who told one story too much."

In Canada, Zijlstra's counterpart as foreign minister is Chrystia Freeland . She too has been repeatedly lying in public about meeting Putin. Initially, her motive was the same as Zijlstra's - to exaggerate her own importance and qualification to be foreign minister.

Freeland APEC with Putin (she lied)
Source

In an interview with CBC News in Toronto on January 13, 2017, three days after her promotion to foreign minister, Freeland declared: "So I've spoken with the top guy [Putin] in Russia quite recently and we spoke in Russian and we had quite a long conversation." This was a lie — Freeland had not met Putin. The story of the lie, and Freeland's efforts to get the Canadian media to repeat it as if true, was first told here. This was published in April of 2017. Since then no Canadian medium has investigated the truth, or challenged Freeland to admit it.

With the encouragement of reporters from the Canadian media, Freeland has continued to lie about her Russian meetings. Here, in May 2017, she was lying again: "I had quite a few productive conversations with Minister Lavrov, both last night over supper and today". For the full story, read this.


Comment: From the link above, Lavrov states:
Freeland claims that "in one of the broader conversations Minister Lavrov did raise issues of Crimea and Ukraine, and as I think Canadians would expect me to do, I was very clear directly with Minister Lavrov in explaining to him that Canada is firm in condemning the Russian invasion of and annexation of Crimea. That is illegal."

This wasn't said between them, according to Lavrov, but in open discussion around the delegates' table at the official dinner. According to Lavrov, "yesterday [Wednesday evening] we talked at the informal dinner reception that was open to ministers and representatives of the Arctic Council only. Russia-Canada relations were among the topics that were raised. We had a brief conversation ahead of this event. During the dinner the Ukraine issue was mentioned and how it affected Russia's relations with western countries, which gave rise to a small debate. I highlighted the manifestations of neo-Nazism and chauvinism we are currently witnessing in Ukraine. In fact, radicals have hijacked the agenda from the president and prime minister in our neighbouring country that we care about. I referred to the draft law on the state language whereby, if adopted, all the citizens of Ukraine would have to use only the Ukrainian language in their day-to-day activities regardless of the language they prefer (be it Russian, Hungarian, Romanian or Polish). This initiative is clearly discriminatory and runs counter to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. My Canadian colleague was not aware of this draft law, and I promised to send it to her."
Further in that link:
Freeland was asked: "Did Russian Minister Lavrov say Russia would lift those sanctions against you so that you can travel to Russia?" "That issue was not raised", she replied.

After referring to Canadian media reporting of the Freeland family's involvement in Ukrainian liquidation of Jews, Russians and Poles during World War II, Evan Solomon (pictured above, left), a CTV network reporter, asked Freeland: "Did you actively tell Sergei Lavrov not to meddle in or undermine the Canadian democracy?" When Freeland replied by saying she had spoken to Lavrov in Russian, she was asked again: "Right, but did you tell Minister Lavrov not to meddle in Canadian democracy?"

Freeland responded: "That issue did not come up."
Indeed, Freeland appears to have many embellished stories. Which ones are true is another story.


Lavrov & anti-Russian Freeland
Source: Freeland's Twitter feed, May 13, 2017, showing Freeland with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (centre) and Russian Ambassador to the US, Sergei Kislyak (left). The encounter lasted seconds during a coffee-break at an Arctic Council meeting in Fairbanks, Alaska. Freeland had pre-positioned her photographer; the Russian officials didn't have time to raise their cups to their mouths.

For the archive of more Freeland lies as a minister of state, click to open.
About: John Helmer is the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. He first set up his bureau in 1989, making him today the doyen of the foreign press corps in Russia.