Morning. Ottawa is highlighting a string of trade deals across the globe and a jump in exports to countries other than the United States. In focus today: Why those optimistic numbers hide a deep disconnect across Canadian households and businesses.

Trade: USMCA should be renewed for 16 years, LeBlanc writes to U.S. and Mexico

AI: Ottawa confirms Canada is now part of Anthropic’s Mythos AI preview program

Real estate: Lower home prices helped revive the Toronto real estate market in May. Sales climbed for the third-straight month.

On paper, at least, Canada’s strategy to shift its economic weight away from the United States looks like a success.

In its spring economic update, the federal government highlighted a $33-billion jump in non-U.S. goods and services exports in 2025 compared to the previous year.

Addressing business leaders last week at the Economic Club of New York, Prime Minister Mark Carney pointed to a flurry of newly signed international trade deals as proof that Canada is successfully weaving a “dense web of international partnerships” to insulate the domestic economy.

The Liberal government’s goal to double non-U.S. exports over the next decade is “on track,” he said, because of accelerated resource and energy shipments overseas – a “feed, fuel, or defend” doctrine meant to safeguard Canadian sovereignty just as Donald Trump revives threats of annexation.

That might be an ambitious goal, but it renders Canada into one team fighting to stay alive in the playoffs – obscuring how those gains will come, and from where.

The country might see its trade numbers improve in aggregate, in other words – but divided across regions and sectors, it will be hard for many households to find much to celebrate.

Concentration nation

Most of the progress in trade diversification is heavily concentrated in five urban hubs, a new report from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce shows – Calgary, Ottawa-Gatineau, Toronto, Saskatoon, and Kelowna. And 60 per cent of the Canada’s total export value was propelled by just 2.6 per cent of the country’s companies, another study by National Bank Financial found.

A small number of companies have navigated the turmoil on the strength of being already established, high-volume commodity producers like crude oil exporters in Alberta, gold mining conglomerates, and multinational agricultural giants shipping pulse crops from the Prairies. Others will need to participate in global trade, the authors wrote, for a structural change to set in.

But smaller firms, which represent about 80 per cent of the country’s exporters, face immutable geographic and logistical challenges that leave them heavily exposed to rising domestic costs and political clashes.

Jonathon Azzopardi, chief executive of Laval Tool & Mould Ltd. in Windsor, Ont., said the $33-billion, 17 per cent jump in non-U.S. trade looks impressive, but that’s partly the result of a “basement-level” starting point.

No amount of overseas diversification will ever replace the economic gravity of the American market, he said in an interview. And diversifying trade isn’t really an option in the same way it might be for a resource company.

“In manufacturing, especially high-skilled, high-priced manufacturing, it’s high-paying jobs and hundreds of them in a small area. The rest of the world wants that,” said Azzopardi, whose company employs 132 people to make the heavy industrial moulds that shape everyday plastics. “If they don’t have it, they want it. How do they get it? They get us to move our business.”

Same team, several players

Carney campaigned on the idea of “One Canadian Economy” aimed at eliminating internal trade barriers and supporting domestic suppliers.

But a deadline baked into a memorandum of understanding between the provinces to dismantle barriers to shipments of wine and spirits came and went last week with no update from the premiers. It’s hard to imagine an MOU between Alberta and Ottawa leading to a massive new pipeline any time soon.

More than a year after the last federal election, Canada is flirting with a technical recession as crucial talks over its trade agreement with the U.S. and Mexico near. GDP is shrinking, unemployment has stuck at six-month highs, and a prolonged period of economic pain is hardening structural and regional differences that will prove difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.

For the foreseeable future, then, it might be more helpful to think of Canada as several economies. Not everyone gets to hoist the Cup at once.