MOOSOMIN — Recently, Trade and Export Development Minister and Melville-Saltcoats MLA Warren Kaeding led a delegation to Vietnam and Singapore to build on Saskatchewan’s trade relationships.
“Ag commodities are generally our big products there,” he said. “Fertilizer — especially when it comes to Vietnam — with potash and then working on the labour mobility side of things — can we help support each other’s ability to train localized staff in highly-skilled jobs and then make them mobile and be able to move back and forth between countries.”
Provincial exports to the Association of Â鶹´«Ã½AVeast Asian Nations totalled $1.5 billion in 2024, with $130.6 million of that going to Vietnam and $10.3 million to Singapore.
“It’s just always good to diversify your markets, and ultimately, we all are spending a fair bit of time out in front of whoever will listen to the story of what we’ve got to offer in Saskatchewan,” Kaeding said.
Kaeding says the audience is listening to what he is saying, as proven at the Canada-in-Asia conference in Singapore.
“Saskatchewan definitely played a key and focal point of where trade is in Canada, and then we certainly got the opportunity to talk a number of times throughout the conference about the opportunities in Saskatchewan,” said Kaeding, who was one of the speakers at the three-day event. “At one time, we were speaking to up to 750 people in Singapore, and they’re all from the ASEAN region. So that’s the key countries in that ASEAN region that we wanted to reach out to.”
Ties with Vietnam also extend to the workforce as Saskatchewan is facing a huge gap of skilled workers that the Asian nation can provide. Back in 2010, the province signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Vietnamese government focused on immigration, education, and entrepreneurship.
“What they’re looking for is those shared opportunities where they can have their high-level educated people working in our institutions and getting a diverse background in whatever area of expertise,” Kaeding said. “Ultimately, after partly done their career, they end up in Vietnam. While we were there in Vietnam, we met Saskatchewan-educated professors, people with PhDs that were running the Vietnamese colleges, that were involved in high-level jobs at the various ministries and even in their private sector.”
Kaeding foresees future interest from the ASEAN region in Saskatchewan, resulting in visits from dignitaries to this province during the summer and fall months.
“One area that we certainly got into with Vietnam was our level of expertise in the nuclear industry, with the number of research facilities we’ve got,” he said. “The other one was carbon capture, and again, first of its kind in the world, we implemented here in Saskatchewan. We have a pile of depth of knowledge now in our research institutions, they wanted to know far more about that.”
Other topics of interest were the rare earth and critical minerals found in Saskatchewan, plus the continued work of the Saskatchewan Research Council.
“I fully expect we’re going to have a number of tours this summer and this fall from different trade ministries, different ministries within Vietnam, and certainly different companies out of that Singapore/ASEAN region that are all going to come out and look at the research and the development work that we’ve done through all of these different institutions,” Kaeding said.
Filling skilled labour positions in the trade sectors is crucial right now, as Kaeding pointed to a huge shortage in the near future.
“Every trade is short right now,” he said. “We can absolutely grow our own—we will, and we do—but we’re not going to have enough.”
By 2030, there will be an estimated 120,000 new job opportunities in Saskatchewan.
“Sixty per cent are going to be filled through attrition, meaning we’ve got an aging workforce, but 40 per cent are going to be brand new jobs that we’re going to create here,” explained Kaeding. “So 120,000 new job opportunities by 2030— that’s not that far from now.”
Some of those jobs may be filled through artificial intelligence—a topic that sometimes ruffles feathers.
“Everyone’s so afraid that we’re going to reduce or remove people from positions,” Kaeding said. “We do not have enough people to fill all those positions, so we’re also going to need to support AI, just to automate some of the things that are maybe very redundant, that we don’t need to have somebody fill.”
He gave an example of how in places such as Indonesia and Malaysia, automation in the palm oil harvest has proven quite successful.
“I thought, ‘how can you possibly use high-end technology there?’ Well, again, they’re struggling with finding labor to harvest, but also in trying to create more efficiencies in that harvest,” Kaeding said. “So now they’ve got drones flying by these huge palm trees, monitoring the harvest time of all those palm kernels, and they will either manage to get them picked the day that they’re ready, and if they’re not ready, they leave them there, fly by two or three days later, or they validate when they anticipate they’re going to be ready by using AI, and then they’ll go back and harvest them the day they’re ready. Just think of the efficiencies that Indonesia and Malaysia are now using in their palm oil harvest.”
