Good morning. Greetings from the Calgary Stampede, where a celebration of Alberta and talks of separation are awkwardly colliding with support from the federal government. That’s in focus today.

Trump lashes out at Iran and allies

» The United States has unleashed military strikes on Iran, the newest blow to a fragile ceasefire agreement. Stock markets dropped worldwide.

» At a summit of NATO leaders, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to cut trade ties with Spain and made renewed claims on Greenland.

» Oil prices jumped by as much as 7 per cent yesterday as the truce buckled under fresh hostilities.

Travel: Air Canada has named Scandinavian Airlines chief Anko Van der Werff as its next CEO.

Retail: Knix founder Joanna Griffiths exits the company she founded in 2013.

Economy: The International Monetary Fund has lowered its global growth forecast again, citing war, trade and AI risk.

Over the past century and a half, the Calgary Stampede has evolved alongside its host city, becoming a decadent, at times absurd and nonetheless riveting event.

The precursor to Stampede was launched in 1886, when the district of Calgary was little more than a CPR station and a police post. The event’s original architects threw together a rodeo that would exhibit the finest agricultural talent and industry of Canada’s Wild West, a bid to draw the finance and power concentrated in Ontario and Quebec across the prairie plains.

Western attire is expected of everyone. Federal Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson spent his first day in the city wearing a staid suit. By the next, he was wearing a leather vest, bolo tie and cowboy boots. Five-star steakhouses decorate their exteriors with hay bales and wooden plank fencing, and corporations from Suncor to Netflix and Google budget tens of thousands to host exclusive open-bar events on the rooftops of Calgary’s finest hotels.

A Stampede specialty is the pancake breakfast. One such breakfast fed guests shot glasses of white-ish liquid poured from a vat of unpasteurized cow milk (milked on-site from a Holstein called Mary) and a concoction of other fluids the event’s hosts claimed were dishwashing liquid, motor oil, Pepto-Bismol and cowboy tears. The taste stays on the tongue, trust me.

It is a familiar adage at Stampede that the Alberta economy can be measured by the sponsorship bids on the chuckwagons – trailers pulled by four horses racing around the rodeo track at 65 kilometres an hour. The bidding happens in April. Should Alberta business be bullish, the bids will be high. This year, the Calgary business community shattered previous records – committing $6.075-million. That’s $2.235-million above 2025.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has pledged to make Canada a resource economy once again, and Alberta is one of his aces in the hole. As Premier Danielle Smith repeated in her remarks at the many events she attended across the week, the “province is having a moment.” In 2026, Stampede has not only enticed money westward, but it is also a celebration of Alberta’s reinstatement as a province of federal priority. The federally backed West Coast pipeline − announced one day before the official kickoff of the Stampede − is a case in point.

However, while the energy executives and politicians gathering on the rooftops of Calgary hotels might be chuffed about political and economic momentum, securing this leverage in Ottawa comes at a cost that has bred uncertainty just as pervasive across the week as the jubilation.

Smith’s referendum vote on provincial separation is only 102 days away. And while the Premier might now be talking about Alberta as “leading the nation” and how she is “delighted to be in a new era of partnership with the federal government” – as she did at a Friday event hosted by Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters – she has unleashed long-held grievances in her province, ones pervasive in agricultural, rural communities far from downtown Calgary.

Stampede 2026 might be a celebration of the provincial industry – and what Alberta has managed to secure from the federal government over the past year – but it has also always been a distinctly Albertan event, born out of a sense of isolation from Central Canada. This sentiment will not expire when Stampede ends.

The pace of Canadian merger and acquisition activity is plummeting while corporate borrowing rates continue to soar, The Globe’s Jameson Berkow reports.

Just 460 transactions involving Canadian companies were announced during the second quarter, according to a report from LSEG Data & Analytics. That’s the lowest deal count for any three-month period since at least 2005.