Aquaculture: The Economic Landscape

In 2024, for the first time since Statistics Canada began tracking the data in 1991, the Atlantic provinces combined produced more farmed finfish than British Columbia. That crossover is one of the more consequential structural changes in Canadian food production, and it has not yet caught up with the public frame, which still treats aquaculture in this country as a BC salmon story. The association is understandable given how much attention the open-net pen debate has generated. It no longer describes where Canadian production actually happens.

Canada’s aquaculture sector produced roughly 160,000 tonnes of farmed seafood in 2024, generating approximately $1.4 billion in sales. Those are meaningful numbers and not large ones by global standards. Norway produces more than 1.5 million tonnes of salmon alone, roughly ten times Scotland’s output and nearly ten times Canada’s entire aquaculture production across all species. Canada is a mid-sized premium cold-water producer, not a global scale setter, and that position determines how the industry is financed and how it competes in export markets.

Salmon dominates the economics. In 2024, finfish accounted for 76 percent of Canadian aquaculture volume and 89 percent of value, with salmon alone representing 55 percent of volume and 65 percent of value. The industry’s revenue, its risk profile, and its political visibility are anchored by a single species. Shellfish matter regionally, particularly mussels in Prince Edward Island and oysters in British Columbia, and they are a smaller economic story at the national level. Mussels represented 13 percent of 2024 production volume and oysters 10 percent, with PEI the largest shellfish producer and BC the largest oyster producer.

The regional picture is more complex than the salmon-in-BC frame suggests. British Columbia produced 64,154 tonnes in 2024, equal to 40 percent of Canada’s aquaculture volume and 41 percent of value, making it still the largest single provincial contributor. But the Atlantic provinces, driven by salmon growth in Newfoundland and Labrador and New Brunswick, have collectively overtaken BC in farmed finfish output. That shift reflects both the regulatory uncertainty suppressing BC production ahead of the 2029 open-net pen ban and genuine Atlantic growth, particularly where companies like Cooke Aquaculture have been expanding operations. Cooke, a private New Brunswick family-owned company that describes itself as the world’s largest private family-owned seafood company, with 13,000 employees and operations in 14 countries, has become one of the defining forces in Atlantic Canadian aquaculture.

The other major operators show how international the ownership of Canadian aquaculture has become. Mowi, the world’s largest salmon producer, is a Norwegian public company with institutional shareholders including BlackRock and Vanguard, financed primarily by secured bank debt, with significant Canadian operations on both coasts. Cermaq, owned by Mitsubishi Corporation of Japan, announced in July 2025 that it had agreed to acquire Grieg Seafood’s operations in British Columbia and Newfoundland for approximately NOK 10.2 billion. Canadian aquaculture is an asset base inside global seafood groups, institutional portfolios, and international corporate balance sheets. That ownership structure determines how capital flows into the sector, where decisions get made, and what financial information reaches the public record.

The export orientation reinforces the same character. Statistics Canada reported that 93.5 percent of Canadian farmed Atlantic salmon exports by quantity went to the United States in 2024, along with 99.5 percent of farmed mussel exports and 92.1 percent of oyster exports. Canadian salmon exports were valued at approximately $944.5 million in 2024. That level of concentration ties Canadian aquaculture economics to US demand, cross-border logistics, exchange rates, and trade conditions. The 2025 US tariff environment added a layer of uncertainty to that dependence, though farmed seafood under CUSMA arrangements retained some preferential access. Exposure to a single foreign market is one of the sector’s most significant structural vulnerabilities.

The regulatory structure governing all of this is not one system but several running in parallel. Every aquaculture site in Canada requires both a valid lease and a current licence before fish can enter the water. DFO is the federal lead for aquaculture management under the Fisheries Act, and provinces and territories typically issue leases and most operating licences. British Columbia is an exception, where DFO licenses aquaculture directly, as is PEI shellfish under a federal-provincial memorandum of understanding. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Quebec each operate under their own provincial statutes and regulations. Canadian aquaculture regulation is a layered federal-provincial system with materially different rules, oversight structures, and operating conditions across regions.