Good morning. When Prime Minister Mark Carney travelled to China earlier this year to revamp economic ties, one Canadian Premier went with him: Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe. In focus today is Saskatchewan’s “soft power” and how it quietly laid the groundwork for the rest of the country to diversify trade, along with news on labour trends.

Investing: Many Canadian investors will get early exposure to SpaceX’s IPO, thanks to new Nasdaq rules.

Trade: Ottawa will introduce new legislation to stop the import of goods made with forced labour as the U.S. threatens new tariffs.

Inflation: The federal government will spend $1-billion over the next 10 years to combat food inflation and shore up Canada’s food supply.

Hi, I’m Kate Helmore, the agricultural reporter for The Globe and Mail, and eight months ago I heard something interesting.

I was at the Canadian Western Agribition in Regina, Canada’s largest livestock show. The former premier of Saskatchewan, Brad Wall, was giving a fireside chat. The host asked him to address this uncertain moment in time. U.S. President Donald Trump had upended rules-based trade, and that’s a big deal for a province that exports more than 60 per cent of what it produces. It was also the major concern of everyone in the room. To be a Canadian farmer is to be a global trader, victim to the whims of those who lead countries much larger than our own.

Wall responded with a story.

Three months prior, his successor, Scott Moe, had boarded a plane to Beijing. Federal officials needed him. They were trying to resolve a trade war that traced its origins back to October, 2024, when then-prime-minister Justin Trudeau launched 100-per-cent tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles, and Beijing retaliated with tariffs of its own on agricultural imports. The levies on canola – Canada’s top crop – had severed access to a $5-billion market for 40,000 farmers across Western Canada.

But getting an audience with the right Chinese officials was proving difficult.

But Moe arrived in Beijing and opened the right doors, Wall told the audience. He knew the right people. Why? Because Saskatchewan had global clout. It had “soft power.” And this type of power was how Canada could survive these uncertain times.

My colleague, economics reporter Mark Rendell, and I have spent the better part of the past year hearing more stories about Saskatchewan’s outsized influence.

It turns out that a province located thousands of miles from the Pacific Ocean and accounting for just 3 per cent of Canada’s total population has influence inside the two largest markets in the world – India and China – plus a web of relationships in other markets across Asia.

The province has also worked to establish a more permanent presence globally, said Alanna Koch, one of the key advisers who established Saskatchewan’s trade diversification strategy. The first trade office Saskatchewan set up was in Shanghai. The province now has offices in Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, India, Germany, Britain and the United Arab Emirates.

The stories featured in my and Mark’s reporting build a pattern. They tell a tale of a province that refused to leave its trade in the hands of Ottawa or its economic prosperity solely in the grasp of the United States.

Saskatchewan might be small within Canada. It does not decide elections. It holds few seats in Parliament. But it has what the world needs: fuel, fertilizer and food. Back in 2007, Wall decided his government would base the prosperity and growth of his province on selling these critical products to as many countries as possible.

The bet seems to have paid off. Saskatchewan’s exports have grown from $19.8-billion in 2007 to more than $45-billion by 2024. It now exports to 160 countries around the world. Nine of the markets it supplies are worth more than $1-billion a year. Provincial exports per capita are double the national average. And it weathered a year that would have crippled most territories built on the back of commodity exports. In 2025, the provincial gross domestic product reached an all-time high of $83.6-billion.

Saskatchewan soft power publishes at a prescient moment. As Carney said, the rules-based international order is over, and trade is a top victim of this worldwide chaos. The Prime Minister has also promised to step up to the task and vowed to uble non-U.S. exports in the next decade, reduce reliance on Trump’s protectionist U.S. and – as Carney said in Davos on Jan. 20 – “prioritize broad engagement.”

Canada’s leaders could learn a lot from the province locked in the centre of the country.

Canadian workers are