The Decibel - Saskatchewan could hold the key to Canada’s foreign trade goals

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

Could Saskatchewan be the key to unlocking Canada’s trade potential? While Ottawa works to double non-U.S. exports over the next decade and rebuild important partnerships, politicians and business leaders may learn a lot by looking to the province in the centre of the country. Nearly twenty years ago, Saskatchewan began strategically diversifying their trading partnerships. It was a great success – the province now exports over 65 per cent of what it makes to about 160 countries. Today, the Globe’s agriculture and food policy reporter Kate Helmore explains how Saskatchewan made a name for itself overseas and what Ottawa could learn as it seeks to branch out to new trading partners. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Canada is cultivating its global trade relationships as it tries to diversify away from the U.S. This hasn't been easy work, especially when some relationships, like the ones with China and India, were on rocky footing. But while Canada is trying to rebuild some partnerships, Saskatchewan has kept close ties. And that's led to the province more than doubling their exports in the past two decades. Saskatchewan has basically created a playbook on diversifying trade abroad. This is a world of relationships. It's about two human beings who know each other, being in the same space, getting to know each other, building trust,

and then allowing that to mature over time, to be present, to be consistent. And I think that's something that Saskatchewan decided to do in quite a strategic way about 20 years ago. And it's a really interesting lesson for Canada that is now trying to do the same thing. Today, Kate Hellmore, the Globe's Agriculture and Food Policy Reporter, joins us. She'll explain how Saskatchewan made a name for itself overseas and what Ottawa could learn as it seeks to branch out to new trading partners.

I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Hi, Kate, nice to see you. Nice to you, too. So Kate, before we dive into how successful Saskatchewan has been when it comes to international trade, why do you think it's important that we look at what approach one relatively small province is taking right now? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good question. I remember trying to describe this story to people who maybe weren't Canadian. Okay, why do you care about what one province is doing?

I was like, you need to understand who Saskatchewan is within the Canadian context. I mean, this is a province of 1.2 million people. That is 3% of the Canadian population. And it's located thousands of kilometers away from a major port with access to these significant markets, developing markets in Asia. And somehow when you go to these markets, as my colleague Mark Randall did go, he went to India. And he just kept in hearing over and over again, we love Saskatchewan. Oh my God, Saskatchewan's the best. This is so interesting.

Yeah. And it's kind of like an interesting example would be. you know, that kid in high school who's a little bit in Oculus and no one really knows who they are. They kind of fly under the radar. And then you realize they're a really, really big deal in their summer camp. And the summer camp is filled with lots of really cool, interesting, powerful people. And that's kind of like Saskatchewan's reputation overseas. And so I was just curious about how it got there.

How did it get that clout? And it matters right now because there's a lot of parallels between Saskatchewan and Canada. You know? Huge landmasses with a vast array of critical resources. but small populations and very little hard power, for example, when it comes to, in Saskatchewan's case, Canada, domestic policy, and in Canada's case when it comes to geopolitics, so how do you leverage those natural resources that you have at your advantage to overcome some of the less advantageous factors of Canada or Saskatchewan to create a soft power in a world in which, as our

Prime Minister said in the Davos speech in January, the rules-based order is over. So we have to be thinking about how can middle powers, how can smaller powers exercise their might? And when you say soft power with Saskatchewan, what do you, what are you describing here? Yeah, I mean, I can give you an example. Yeah. The thing that really got this ticking for me, I was in Regina at a conference, I call it like Paris Fashion Week for cows. I love that. Yeah, it's great. You've got like manicurists and hairstylists. It's all just for cows, though. I'm just watching cows walk down the runway right now. Exactly. Yeah. That would be great.

But no, and the former premier of Saskatchewan, Bradwell, was giving a fireside. And he said they'd heard an interesting story. It was September. And over the last year, we were kind of in a bit of a trade war with China over canola and EVs. We had put tariffs on Chinese EV imports and they had responded by tariffing agricultural products, specifically canola, which is our number one most lucrative crop. And it counts for, like, China's like a $5 billion market for canola farmers. And what I'd heard was that federal officials in Beijing weren't able to get an audience with the right Chinese ministers. And so Provenor Saskatchewan, Scott Moe, got on a plane, flew to Beijing, touched down and opened the right doors. And he did that

And he could do that because in 2019, he'd been in China for a trade mission and he'd spent some time with the governor of a province who six years later happens to be China's head of Minister of Commerce. So that really shows that the relationship building here with Saskatchewan worked in their favor and actually helped out the federal government. Exactly. I want to get into how Saskatchewan managed to do this. Before we do that, though, I think it's important to kind of get some numbers to kind of really understand how Saskatchewan grew its exports. So how much is the province exporting to other countries? What kind of money are we talking about? And how does that compare to other provinces?

Three questions in one. Sorry. No worries. Okay. So currently Saskatchewan exports about 65% upwards of 65% of the stuff it makes. It is an export province. And that's because the fundamentals of its economy are resources, right? We've got mining.

We've got energy and we've got agriculture. That is Saskatchewan's economy. And so in 2024, it exported about $45 billion worth of goods. By the way, that's an increase from $19 billion in 2007. But I want to pause and say that doesn't make it the most powerful exporter in Canada. There are four provinces that export more Saskatchewan. Ontario takes the top spot. Then you've got Quebec, Alberta, and even British Columbia,

which is kind of more on par. They're around 50, 50 billion. But Saskatchewan, again, think about what Saskatchewan is. This is 3% of the Canadian population, and they still account for $45 billion in export. And they actually export double the national rate on a per capita basis. So exports are an enormous part of Saskatchewan's economy. When I spoke to Scott Moe, he put it this way. He said, we know this is the fundamental basis of our economy.

We prioritize exports. They're very important to us. So we have a sophisticated relationship with trade and understanding of trade. What's the province mainly selling? Its biggest kind of ace in the hole is something called potash. So your listeners have probably heard me talk about potash a few times before. It takes up a lot of what I do as an agricultural reporter. It is a fertilizer.

So it is this coral pink rock that we mine from under the ground. And then we spread it across fields and it's essential to plant growth. It's one of three core fertilizers. So you've got your potash, your phosphate, and your nitrogen. And Saskatchewan has this edge, competitive edge, because it's a mined product. And there's really very few places in the world that have known, explored, huge deposits of potash. You've got Belarus, Russia and Saskatchewan.

And Saskatchewan has the largest high-grade deposits. So we just kind of have this complete captured market. So that's its number one. But Saskatchewan is also a huge global leader when it comes to agricultural exports. It's the number one exporter of canola. But then you've also got lentils, durham wheat, peas, which can all be used in a high in demand in places like India because they can be turned into quite high protein products. So that's really popular. And then you've got uranium and other mining products as well.

So like deep resources, essentially. Okay. So Kate, let's now talk about how Saskatchewan got to this position that they're in today. So there's this major turning point for the province's trade ambitions in 2007. So what happened then? Okay. So Brad Wall becomes Premier of Saskatchewan. And he says, we are going to set specific growth targets.

And he goes to all of his ministers and says, we want to know what a growth target is for the next, you know, four or five years. And the only way you're going to reach those targets is with exports. So they pursue an export diversification strategy. Brad also told me that he's sitting there and he's looking at Saskatchewan exports and realizing that the US accounts for around 60% of them. Sounds like a familiar kind of situation. And Brad Wool, 20 years before, Mark Carney is having this conversation right now, says we can't do that. At the time, the US is a reliable trading partner, right? But we can't be putting all of our eggs in this one basket.

He's before his time. Before his time. So what can we do? And he looks at Saskatchewan's economy and says, well, we have the fuel, the fertilizer and the food, the developing countries want and need. And the fastest growing developing countries in the world right now is Asia. So we're going to build into those markets. And then they design a pretty specific playbook. Yeah, what's this playbook?

Okay. So I spoke to one of the kind of the key advisors, architects of this playbook. It's a woman called Alana Cox. She was Deputy Minister of Agriculture. she was also one of Brad Wall's deputy ministers as well. And so she kind of broke it down to free stages. The first one is obviously identify the market that you want to build into. And then get the Premier on a plane and send him to that market.

And the reason why it's important that Premier goes is because it tells that country, those businesses, those other politicians, hey, you matter to us. We think you're important and we're willing to invest the time and energy of the leader of our entire province into building that relationship. So they do that first. And then after the Premier's visit, deputy ministers go overseas. So that might be the Minister of Trade and Export Development.

It might be a minister that oversees mining and environment. And they take with them industry. And that happens through something called Step. So that's the Saskatchewan Trade and Export Development Organization. It's provincially backed to the tune of $3.2 million a year. And the idea is that let's say you take a small company that wouldn't be able to fund this kind of trade mission in any other way, they sit that company down next to maybe a massive, important company in this new market and says, okay, what can we do here? How can we sign a deal? How can we make a

relationship? And that's their entire gig. And then the last stage is bricks and mortar. You set up specific trade offices in the key markets where you think are important. So Saskatchewan has nine across the world. And the idea of having a physical presence in these markets is because you never know what's going to go wrong. And a company, if it's going to start selling into new scary places, for example, wants to know as a human being on the other side of a telephone who can march down to the port and solve a problem. And that person's interests are Saskatchewan, not the federal interest. Because again, there are federal employees, global affairs, federal employees who operate in these markets too. But Saskatchewan decided they want to have

their own guys on the ground. Okay, so this is this playbook that Saskatchewan has developed to kind of make its play for trade experts around the world. You know, some of the things you brought up there, like this bringing a delegation of people to different countries, something we're kind of seeing now with Carney, right, going with business leaders to Mexico, for example, or to India or to China. But I'm wondering about, do we know how this compares to what we're seeing from other provinces in Ottawa during this time? I have another story for you. I love stories. This auto was a series of stories that were collected by me and my colleague Mark Rundell for about eight months. But one of them, again, from Bradwell, he said that an aha moment for him

was he was sitting in the back of a car in packed traffic in New Delhi. It was around 2011. And he'd just been picked up from the airport by the Trade Commissioner, a federal employee of Ottawa. And Bradwell understood that there was a deal that. There was a deal that. that was trying to be signed between the Indian buyers, Indian fertilizer buyers, and Bradwell was hearing that it wasn't really happening. There were some problems. There was some price disagreements. And that was part of the reason why he was in India.

There was some other stuff he wanted to do too, but that was a big part of why he was there. And so he was sat in a car next to the trade commissioner and he said, oh, by the way, how's that deal going? And the trade commissioner goes, oh, it's solved. It's done. It's all good. We're moving on. We're talking about Blackberry. It was the period of Blackberry cell phones.

is what we're focusing on right now. And Brad knew that wasn't right. He knew the deal hadn't been signed. He said that he felt that was an omission. And it was a significant one because Saskatchewan was a big deal in India. It was 40% of Canada's exports to the country were from Saskatchewan. So this should have been a high priority file for this individual. And it wasn't.

And that was when Brad realized that Saskatchewan might be a big deal in India, but it still kind of had that reputation within Canada for being not very important. And they weren't necessarily going to be able to change that, but what they could do is they could go out by themselves. They could go under their own flag. And that's when they kind of launched this very methodical strategy. And it's not that other provinces like British Columbia, for example,

don't have their own offices. It's just that like that idea of being like, we're going to fly the Saskatchewan flag and we're going to do it by ourselves because we know we don't have clout nationally, but we're going to build our country. clout internationally. We'll be right back.

So Brad Wall got this trade strategy off the ground, but the province is still quite focused on trade today. And in 2018, current Premier Scott Moe is elected. How does he move this strategy forward? Yeah. So Scott Moe just basically kicks up a notch. He goes on more trade missions every year. And he spends a lot of money on those trade missions.

So, you know, in the story, I compare, for example, all the. the places that Scott Moe has gone and his spending on those different missions, coup, the Premier of Ontario, who was also elected in 2018, with a population that is 12 times larger than Saskatchewans. And as far as non-US missions, Doug Ford hasn't been anywhere from like 2018 to 2025. And Scott Moe has been to Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Beijing, New Delhi, Frankfurt. London, you name it, Scott Mogets on a plane and he goes. That's really interesting. So something that you mentioned there, but I think is worth kind of

is lingering on, is that this is not a cheap endeavor, right? Like having delegations of politicians and businesses travel to different countries, having your premier travel to all these different places, also opening up trade offices. And then just of course the fact of focusing on trade means that other things might not be getting as much attention in the province. Has there any pushback to this focus on trade? Yeah, there has been. And probably rightfully so. I mean, Saskatchewan, stop for a second.

Saskatchewan has a shortage of paramedics, a shortage of substitute teachers, a shortage of family doctors. In fact, it was recently ranked as the most difficult province for accessing a family doctor. So you can understand how someone from Saskatchewan would say, why are we funding these extravagant trade missions to all these other countries when we don't even have enough of what we need here? These are critical domestic issues and you're overseas for some reason. What's the government said about this? They will say, and I put that question to Warren Cating, who is the Minister of Trade and Export Development for the province.

And he said, yeah, yeah, we see all of that, but we have to grow the economy if we're going to solve those problems. And the way we grow the economy is through exports. That's the kind of the fundamental rationale that Saskatchewan sees everything through. At least this government and Brad Wall's government did. that's kind of the logic of how they think. But just to pause on the expenses for a moment, because I do think it's important that we notice that as kind of like a, as a criticism of this.

But between October, 20 to 24 and March 2025, Saskatchewan's Premier, his Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Trade and Export Development, racked up $140,000, more than $140,000 in publicly listed travel expenses for trade missions, and that's just to non-U.S. markets. And I mean, the NDP, for example, the opposition party in 2024, they had something called the Spendies, a bit of a tongue-in-cheek moment when they handed out fictional awards at the legislature to, you know, ministers they believed had maybe gone, you know, a bit too far. And so one included Crown Investment Corporation Minister Dustin Duncan for his transportation tab around Paris, where he paid the equivalent of $3,500 for a shuttle van across a few days.

days. And then in March 2024, the Energy and Resources Minister had a four-day trip to Toronto with for him and four other delegates that cost $27,000. Like, this is also a large amount of money. Again, for a small population. This is 1.2 million people that are backing this. Yeah. Okay. So, so there's criticisms around the spending around this, this trade. And also the government saying that this is meant to be a part of economic growth. And this is what we're going to focus on. And given how successful their trade diversification has been. Do we know why some of these issues in the province aren't already being addressed? Like you talked about the lack of paramedics, for example. I mean, it's a good question we'd have to put to them, and I'm sure there's a myriad of factors.

But one of the issues with something like this, and the federal government is going to come up against it too, is there's kind of there's a nonlinear return on investment here, right? So, for example, Brad Wall told me a story, enough a story for you guys. And that's that it was around 2011, 2012, when he was in India. And Saskatchewan had some internal sources that were saying that there was this leader of this region who was pretty politically powerful. And they think they thought he was going to go places. So Bradwell was like, okay, great, I'll sit down. I'll get to know him.

That man was Narenda Modi, who ended up being the prime minister of the entire kind of. country, right? So Saskatchewan has a relationship with this man that stretches back from before he was a prime minister. But you have to ask yourself, they met with Modi, but how many other people did they meet with? Maybe there was 10 other people they sat down with and whined and dined. They didn't amount to anything substantial, right? But you have to kind of sit down with the 10 or the 11 people on the off chance that one of them ends up being someone influential in the future. But you can't come back from that trade mission and say, hey, that cost us $50,000, but we signed $65,000 worth in deals, so therefore return on investment was $15,000.

Scott Moe didn't know in 2019 when he met with who was now the Minister of Commerce for, you know, the CCP, that person would be important in six years time. That important six years time. It paid off, but there's no way of guaranteeing that. So it is, it's a really tricky thing to justify to a taxpayer. Yeah. And one of the thing I'm thinking about is like economic growth, again, is the goal here. But then does that translate into jobs for people in Saskatchewan?

Saskatchewan sees, you know, the Department of Trade and Export Development, it's also the department that handles investments. So it sees it always part of the same bucket. Like if you want to build things in Saskatchewan, whether that is a mine or a food processing plant, A, you want to be able to tell an investor they have access to markets. And B, you want to be able to also give that access to markets to, grow the businesses, they spend more money in the province. And that does seem to have paid off. So the last time I was on the decibel, for example, we talk about something called the

BHP Jansen Project. So BHP is the largest minor in the world. Pink gold. We talked about. Pink gold, exactly. Which is potash. Yeah, potash again. And they've invested, you know, $18 billion into Saskatchewan. They're an Australian-based company. And they can do that because they maybe feel they have more reliable access to these international markets. And if Saskatchewan didn't have that to offer them, then maybe they go somewhere else. And that's genuinely an investment Saskatchewan, people, employees, jobs, that kind of stuff. So what you've laid out here, Kate, is the success that Saskatchewan has really had on the international stage when it comes to exports. But are there challenges for the province?

Like, is there anything holding the province back in pursuing their trade ambitions even for There. One also thing to point out as well is that Saskatchewan may have invested in these relationships, for example, take India, take China. But it didn't mean it didn't fall victim and hasn't fallen victim to tariffs from those countries over the last two years, for example, in November, India levied tariffs on like pea imports from the world, including Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan didn't get special treatment. So you could point to that and say this is evidence the system doesn't work, right? But speaking to people who are ex-executive, but in the space, you know, in trade.

They'll say, yeah, but there's lots of other countries in the world that face the same issues. If you look at Japan, Korea, Australia, completely, very dependent on China for trade. Their solution to dealing with a country that is very quick and very willing to impose tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers is not to back away, but to lean in. You have to develop the relationships even more if you want to be safe in those markets. You need even more cell phone numbers, even more meetings, because you know they're going to do that, your question is how can you resolve it faster? The other challenge would be

that Saskatchewan is a landlocked province. It's just like rectangle in the center of Canada. It doesn't have access to a major port that it can ship out of into these important Asian markets. It relies on the port, specifically the port of Vancouver, to do that. So Saskatchewan does operate as far as its trade diversification strategy as kind of its own entity, but it's not independent from Canada.

It's part of Canada. It depends on the other provinces to make that happen. And when it looks at the trade infrastructure, and I ask this to the Minister of Trade and Export Development, what do you want? What's the next stage? And he said, well, we need the federal government to invest in trade infrastructure.

Like, we can create demand in these new markets. But if we are seeing infrastructure challenges, if we just have bottlenecks, we can't do anything about that. So, Saskatchewan has no jurisdiction there. What is the federal government going to do to make that better? Okay, so the big question then is what can the federal government learn from the example of Saskatchewan? Like what are the lessons here when it comes to trade? There is one more caveat to make there.

And that is that Saskatchewan maybe has a little bit more nimbleness and a little bit more freedom than a federal government would have when it comes to trade relationships. If you are dealing with a country that is violating human rights or I don't know, one of the countries is, interfering in our elections or is seeming to back assassins killing people in British Columbia, you know, as happened with the Sikh separatist, a federal government has to take a stand. Maybe, right? That's the choice that Justin Trudeau's government made was to take a stand on those issues because it saw them as ideologically opposed to the values of Canada. A province can be a little bit more flexible and a little bit more nimble than the feds can be.

And so maybe something to take away from that is to say, okay, with the federal government It kind of has its hands tied here. What are the provinces doing? And then when our hands are untied, how can we use them? How can we use the fact that they've maintained a relationship as we saw in September to kind of dethore our own relationship? But zooming out and looking at specifically what kind of can learn from Saskatchewan, lean into relationships and interweave economies and grow dependency as a way of building soft power

and influence on a global stage. Kate, this has been a really interesting conversation. Thanks, as always, for coming on the show. Always my pleasure. Thank you. That was Kate Hellmore, the globe's agriculture and food policy reporter. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Ali Graham produced today's episode.

Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin and Mahal Stein. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer. and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.