Premiers at odds over leveraging potash in Canada’s trade war with U.S.

OTTAWA – Premiers are sharply divided over whether to use Canada’s natural resources as leverage in the trade war with the U.S., and potash has emerged as a key point of contention.

Canada is a major global supplier of potash, a key ingredient in fertilizers that are vital for the agricultural sector. The U.S. imports about 85 per cent of its potash from Canada.

While Ontario’s Doug Ford is pushing to pull the most damaging levers with the U.S., Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe and Alberta’s Danielle Smith are warning about a harmful long-term backlash.

Federal politicians are also weighing in. NDP leader Avi Lewis called for an export tax on “oil, gas, thermal coal, potash and other minerals to hit Trump where it hurts.”

Federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May agrees.

“If you’re dealing with a really large bully who’s beating you up, you really need to get out your keys, put them between your fingers, and go for soft, fleshy parts that are gonna hurt,” she told The Canadian Press.

“And that for us would be withholding potash.”

At a news conference Wednesday, Ford said cutting the U.S. off from potash would kill the American agricultural sector “overnight.”

But Moe, whose province supplies the U.S. with more than 86 per cent of the potash coming in from Canada, has said that such a move would backfire and harm Canadians.

“That would be a tremendous economic hit to our province and to our nation,” Moe said at a news conference this week, warning of job losses and price hikes.

He said Saskatchewan would not support any kind of export taxes or withholding supply, but did open the door to leveraging access to additional production in trade negotiations.

“The United States of America, most assuredly, would switch to buying potash from other nations around the world. We would lose a long-term customer to some degree.”

And while the drastically differing viewpoints of Ford and Moe may suggest cracks in the “Team Canada” approach that premiers and the prime minister have championed over the past year, one expert says it’s a matter of perspective.

“Ontario and B.C., are the provinces that are going to be hit the most by the tariffs that Trump is rolling out,” said Jim Farney, the director and Stauffer Dunning chair at the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University.

He said he has seen some analysis suggesting Alberta and Saskatchewan will be “hardly touched” by the U.S. tariffs.

Heather Exner-Pirot, a senior fellow and director of natural resources, energy and environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, also said the tariff impact is “much more pungent” in places like Ontario with the auto and steel sectors being hit.

“Out west, we don’t talk about CUSMA, we don’t talk about the tariffs. They’re a very small part of our lives and our economy, and we’re not getting damaged and it’s not really affecting us,” Exner-Pirot, who’s also an adviser with the Business Council of Canada, told The Canadian Press.

“It is having such a different impact out West, and we don’t want it to have the same impact.”

Taking questions from reporters Wednesday, Moe said one way to leverage natural resources in trade negotiations is to barter with “access to additional production” of potash, uranium and oil.

But Exner-Pirot said such a move with potash might not make much of an impact.

“In the United States, it’s not the growing market for potash. It’s pretty saturated. They use as much as they can use, and they’re efficient at it,” she said.

She also said potash companies like Nutrien started stockpiling supply in the United States to get ahead of any potential tariffs or export taxes.

“So when we say, ‘well, we’ll put an export tax on it,’ well, that won’t apply to what’s already there,” she said.

Trump administration officials have repeatedly pointed out how the U.S. has not tariffed Canadian oil, energy, uranium and potash. White House officials have indicated there’s no intention at this point to change course.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 27, 2026.

— With files from Sarah Ritchie, and Kelly Geraldine Malone in Washington