Good morning. PEI is dealing with millions of dead oysters as two diseases ravage its supply – more on that below, along with Iran’s soaring inflation and the high-tech World Cup. But first:

• LeBlanc says he offered “specific proposals” to end the trade war as Trump revives his threats of annexation
• PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon accuses Carney of trying to undermine support for sovereignty ahead of Quebec’s election
• Health Canada is examining the concerns raised by the family of a student who died after donating plasma

On good days, the Raspberry Point Oysters processing plant in Cavendish, PEI, smells like a freshly shucked bivalve, clean and salty with a little seawater brine. These days, however, the odor is awful, a trapped-in-a-barn-in-the-summer sort of stink. Workers hand-pluck dead oysters off a conveyor belt – sorting through them all is so labour intensive, Raspberry Point had to hire more staff. A truck then moves those dead oysters by the thousands to a bank of the Hope River, where the mountain of shells topped six million last month.

PEI’s $27-million oyster industry is being ravaged by a pair of diseases: Dermo and multinucleate sphere unknown, or MSX. That X is telling. Although MSX has been around since the mid-1950s, not much is certain about how it’s transmitted or the exact way it spreads. Both diseases are harmless to humans – scientists do know that for sure – but they’re lethal for oysters. MSX wipes out 95 per cent of the oysters it infects.

But MSX is also a waiting game, because this massive die-off doesn’t actually happen until two or three years after infection occurs. For PEI’s oyster farmers, the clock started in July 2024, when the Canadian Food Inspection Agency found MSX at three aquaculture sites across the island. It was the first time the disease had been detected in the province. “People were on tenterhooks in 2024, since at the time it was unknown just how much MSX had spread,” Lindsay Jones, The Globe’s Atlantic reporter, told me. “But the feeling was ominous.”

The CFIA placed the sites under quarantine to try to contain the outbreak. Still, the following summer, oyster mortality rates across PEI hovered around 50 per cent, and up to 90 in some places. Disaster struck again that July: Oysters in Egmont Bay tested positive for Dermo, which kills at least half of affected shellfish. By this spring, many farmers on the island’s western side – where the vast majority of PEI’s oysters are grown – were pulling up cages from the sea to find practically all of their oysters dead.

There’s one silver lining to this huge die-off – it suggests 2026 may represent the worst of the damage, Jones said. And PEI farmers can take heart in the experience of the U.S. oyster industry, which “went through an MSX devastation, found a way out and bounced back,” she told me. “Islanders are hopeful they can follow this roadmap, though there’s still major economic fallout along the way.”

To that end, both the provincial and federal governments announced a series of supportive measures last month, including $3-million from PEI to cover interest costs on business loans, plus more than $5-million from Ottawa for farmers to restock and rebuild their harvests. The plan is to purchase oyster seed that’s shown to be impervious to both diseases, and to import MSX-resistant brood stock – oysters kept in hatcheries for breeding – from the U.S. in order to grow new supply.

These strategies are a waiting game, too: It takes roughly three years for oysters to reach market size, so PEI’s industry isn’t expected to rebound before then. But Jones sees reason for some optimism. “I’ve been in touch with folks who are already producing MSX-resistant oyster seed at Bideford Shellfish Hatchery in Lennox Island First Nation on the island,” she said. “They put their first batch of seed out last spring, and so far, 85 per cent have survived. That’s promising.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to the Trump administration after at least 22 people were killed in a Russian assault, as Moscow exploits Ukraine’s growing shortage of American-made air defence missiles. Read more here from The Globe’s Mark MacKinnon on the ground in Kyiv.

At home: Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada’s contracting economy is linked to the government’s decision to scale back immigration.

Abroad: Iran’s inflation rate hit 77 per cent last month – a level unseen since the Second World War – deepening the country’s economic pain as peace talks stall.

Sports: At the World Cup this summer, the beautiful game is going high-tech with smart balls, 3-D graphics and player body scans for faster offside calls.

Tech: Amazon, Microsoft and Google