About

Blue Finance Canada is an independent publication that examines how financial decisions reach the ocean. A credit committee approves a loan, an investor puts money into a fund, and at the far end something gets built or harvested in salt water, with consequences that can run well past the decision itself. This site traces those connections plainly, across the instruments of blue finance, the Canadian ocean industries connected to them, and the governance around them.

Canada is the natural place to do this work. We have the longest coastline in the world and three oceans, and the financial system here has real capacity, yet practical use of blue finance inside Canadian institutions remains thin. Part of what this site does is translate emerging ideas into forms people can put to use, whether they sit on a credit committee, write policy, or make their living on the water.

The site holds a few different kinds of material, and they are meant to work together. The essays take one question and follow it as far as it goes, sometimes to a blue bond, sometimes to a fish stock, sometimes to who pays when a coastline gives way. The industry profiles are reference material on Canadian fisheries, aquaculture, ports, shipping, offshore energy, and the rest, maintained and updated as conditions change. And Blue Currents is the monthly newsletter, covering what actually happened in Canadian ocean finance that month. It carries the Blue Register, my own metric of how mature blue finance has become in Canada.

I'm Brian Rogers, and I write it. I grew up moving every few years as my father's work took the family across the country, with one stretch south of the border, and a good number of the places we landed sat near the water. There was the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, then the Atlantic off Jacksonville, then the Salish Sea on Vancouver Island, where I finished high school. The beach is where most of my childhood memories are set, and being on and under the water has stayed with me ever since.

In 2002 I spent two weeks on a field expedition in Iceland, helping scientists gather climate research. I had been in banking for a decade by then. It showed me how much our way of living is changing the natural world, and I carried that through the rest of my career in finance.

After a commerce degree in finance, I spent more than thirty years in commercial banking and credit, lending to Canadian businesses across forestry, agriculture, real estate, and manufacturing. Along the way I earned an MBA, the CFA charter, and the ICD.D. The last stretch was in the credit union sector, where I ended as Chief Risk Officer.

I am not an oceanographer. My background is in finance and risk, and that is the lens I bring to this work. Blue Finance Canada is an attempt to understand, and explain plainly, how financial decisions reach the ocean, where the existing system works, where it does not, and how it might evolve.

Blue Finance Canada is independently written and funded. It carries no advertising and no sponsored content.

The publication has a point of view. I believe finance can do a better job of recognizing how much it depends on healthy natural systems, and the consequences that financial decisions can have beyond the transaction itself. I want that argument to rest on evidence instead of assertion, and to leave room for complexity, trade-offs, and disagreement. I am not against growth. I am against growth where somebody else picks up the cost.

The whole project in one line is to evolve finance for a living ocean. I can be reached at Brian@BlueFinance.ca.