Barely two weeks since the finance minister dropped her budget on an unsuspecting public and the financial pain is already being felt

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When Chrystia Freeland published her book on the gaping inequality between the world’s small tribe of power-broking billionaires and the rest of us ordinary wage schmucks, the National Post gave it a rave review.

“Plutocrats isn’t a strident, whiny smack-down of the status quo, but a clear-eyed account of the social and political implications of a class of super-rich who hold an increasing portion of global wealth,” reviewer Richard Poplak wrote.

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If anything, he suggested, Freeland was too measured in her treatment of this “cozy global village” of tycoons that “flits from Davos to Aspen to TED, firming up networks and driving a brand of philanthro-capitalism based on the precepts of zero-sum wealth accumulation.”

That was in 2012 when Freeland was merely an “insightful and indefatigable reporter” — as termed by Bloomberg Businessweek — well before she ascended through politics to become Canada’s finance minister. “Plutocrats” identified three groups of uber fat cats sucking up all the wealth: Russian oligarchs, Wall Street titans and (often American) corporate wunderkinds. Think corrupt Putin cronies, gargantuan private equity fund overseers and one-man money machines like Elon Musk, currently seeking a US$56-billion pay package.

But politics changes people. In her latest budget Freeland announced she’d be “making Canada’s tax system more fair by asking the wealthiest to pay their fair share.” In........

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