Good morning. Around the world, countries are taking steps to protect their economic security – even as the U.S President backs down from some of his most aggressive trade threats. In Mankota, Sask., a helium facility is turning out a gas deemed critical for its role in aerospace, medicine, and semiconductors. But before it can be sold – even to Canadian buyers – it must be trucked to the United States for liquefaction. My report from the site, and what that dependence means, below.

Bay Street: BlackRock Inc.’s Canadian operations, the country’s largest exchange-traded fund provider, has announced the departure of Helen Hayes as head of its ETF division.

Retail: Hudson’s Bay will begin clearance sales at six stores that the retailer previously left out of the liquidation, according to new court documents. Clothing retailer Frank and Oak, meanwhile, is closing all 14 of its shops.

Sustainability: Canada’s securities regulators have halted work on mandatory climate and diversity disclosures, marking a major setback for the ESG movement amid mounting economic pressures and political backlash.

Rogers has a sports empire. Now it wants a payout.

• The big picture: Rogers owns the Toronto Blue Jays, is set to take 75 per cent control of MLSE — owner of the Maple Leafs and Raptors — and just signed an $11-billion NHL deal.
• These are crown jewels of Canadian sports. With its stock under pressure, Rogers is looking to cash in.
• Looking back: The telecom bet big on live sports content a decade ago to fend off cord-cutting. Sports revenue is rising, but its media division still posted a $67-million quarterly loss.
• What’s happening now: Executives say they’re in “earnest” talks with investors as they aim to tap into the value of their sports holdings to help lift the stock and tackle its debt load.

The gravel lot is quiet, the building squat and windowless – about the size of a small hockey rink. There’s a machine humming from somewhere inside, but not enough to drown out the lowing of cattle just over the fence.

Then a door opens with a hollow report. It’s from a smaller building near the road – one of a few scattered across a wide, empty patch of prairie. A man steps out and waves from the top of a short metal staircase. That must be Clayten Wenaas, a field engineer and operations superintendent with North American Helium Inc.

This small structure is the control room – quiet, cool and filled with the smell of the most awful, perfect kind of coffee. Two other men sit in high-backed office chairs, shifting seamlessly between small talk and technical diagnostics. After a while, one of them leans forward: “Wanna go check it out?” Wenaas grabs a helmet off the shelf and offers it up.

Over a short walk to the larger building, he and the two operations managers – Ty Eklund and Kurt Silbernagal – describe what awaits: a maze of compression skids, heat-exchange chillers and pressure-swing adsorption towers, each component fine-tuned to remove trace gases and deliver high-purity helium.

“It’s all automated, but we’re always watching,” Wenaas says. “Any pressure change or temperature shift – we’re on it.”

He opens the door. The sound is intense enough to make you reach for the earmuffs clinging to the top of your helmet – if only one of the others would do the same – and the scale of the operation comes fully into view: tall steel columns, thick interlacing pipes, and high-spec equipment spaced just wide enough to move between.

North American Helium has invested more than half a billion dollars in facilities like this across Saskatchewan’s southwest since the Calgary-based company’s inception in 2013. In less than five years of operation, it now produces about 85 per cent of Canada’s helium, which is created deep beneath the earth’s surface through the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium.

Its site in Mankota, a village of 200 that was founded more than a century ago, serves as one of the company’s key purification centres. Pipelines running from five well sites, each drilling thousands of metres into underground reservoirs, send helium here to be run through its state-of-the-art systems under the careful eye of the operations crew.

Walking the length of the plant, the trio unpacks the process that unfolds in a surprisingly elegant system of vessels, valves and pipes. “This is one of our more advanced operations,” Wenaas says. From here, the purified product will be piped into specially fitted transport trucks and carried to the U.S. for final processing – Canada does not have a helium liquefaction facility – and deeper into the supply chain to countries around the world rushing to secure key resources.

Helium is a noble gas, but it’s officially classified as a critical mineral in Canada. The term applies to materials essential to economic and national security, especially those vulnerable to supply disruptions. That includes a broad spectrum of substances, from gases like helium to metals like lithium, which is both a key industrial input and a cornerstone of battery technology. If Canada wants to compete in a high-tech economy, it can’t do it without helium.

“What we don’t have is the liquefaction infrastructure to turn our gas into liquid helium – and that’s the critical missing piece in Canada,” said Clayton Paradis, a company spokesperson. “If we had a liquefier here, we’d eliminate tens of millions of miles of trucking each year just to get our gas processed.

“We could have an ecosystem that includes processing, transport and policy support all right here in Canada.”

That last piece is still catching up. While Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba have introduced supportive policies and critical mineral strategies, Ottawa has yet to meaningfully follow suit – a gap that, according to industry leaders such as Chris Bakker, is hampering investment and slowing the sector’s ability to scale.

Bakker, co-chair of the Helium Developers Association of Canada, is pushing the federal government to match the provincial momentum. The group is urging the government to change tax rules so investors in helium projects can claim the same tax deductions they can with other critical mineral developments. Doing so, he argues, would unlock early-stage investment while also drawing in more foreign investment.

“Canada’s a small country with a limited investment pool,” said Bakker, who is also the chief executive officer of Avanti Helium Corp., a Calgary-based company with helium plays on both sides of the border. “When I’m competing for those dollars on an uneven playing field, it hurts.”