Blue Finance Canada archive
Essays, analysis and explainers from across Blue Finance Canada, arranged from newest to oldest.
78 published essays
Whale numbers have climbed back from near-extinction. So has their work in the ocean: moving nutrients up through the water, carrying carbon to the seafloor. The waters they returned to are busier and louder, and what happens next depends on how those waters are managed.
Open-net pen salmon farming ends in coastal BC on June 30, 2029. DFO has launched a systematic review of the sea lice evidence, the peer-reviewed literature points in several directions, and no independent analysis exists of what replacing BC production would cost.
Canadian farmed salmon exports were worth $944.5 million in 2024, and 93.5 percent went to one market. Open-net pen production in BC ends in 2029, with no proven replacement at that volume. The capital to build one has to be committed before a lender has anything to price against.
In 2024 the Atlantic provinces out-produced British Columbia in farmed finfish for the first time since 1991. Salmon accounts for 65 percent of the value of Canadian aquaculture, and 93.5 percent of farmed salmon exports go to the United States. The ownership is largely foreign.
The ocean rose 5.9 millimetres in 2024, above the recent trend. Atlantic Canada, sinking as seas rise, could see a metre by 2100. A major Fraser flood could cost $20 to $30 billion. That exposure is being built and financed now, at conditions the assets were never designed for.
Since the industrial era, the ocean’s surface pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1, a 26 percent increase in acidity. Shell-building species feel it first, and in BC it already reaches juvenile salmon through the food web. The finance built around those fisheries has not priced it in.
Reserve land can’t be pledged as conventional loan collateral. That constraint has shaped what Indigenous communities can finance, who can lend to them, and how stewardship, infrastructure and ownership are funded.
$335 million closed in the Great Bear Sea, with $152 million of it endowed in perpetuity. Perpetual money requires a perpetual counterparty. Tenure, enforcement, and decision-making continuity are the three questions that set the term on any long-duration exposure, and they were answered first.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation keeps northwestern Europe warmer than its latitude allows and drives some of the North Atlantic's most productive fisheries. The question of whether it is slowing down is one of the most consequential in climate science right now.
Canada claims the Northwest Passage as internal waters. Russia, Norway, and the United States are building Arctic presence faster than Canada is. The sovereignty argument is well established; the physical capacity to back it is still being bought. A look at the gap between the two.
Ice-class vessels, a four-month season, and conservative insurers make commercial Arctic shipping a hard case. Public capital, Indigenous ownership, and resource balance sheets carry the weight instead. A look at who finances Canada's Arctic marine infrastructure, and why.
Ninety percent of goods reaching Canada's northern communities arrive by sea in a short summer window. Behind the Northwest Passage headlines, Arctic shipping is a community lifeline with sparse ports and thin economics, not the commercial trade route its reputation suggests.