Three decades in Canadian financial services, most recently as Chief Risk Officer in the credit union sector. Founded Blue Finance Canada to examine how financial decisions reach the ocean. CFA, MBA, ICD.D.
Ocean Life
Kelp grows up to half a metre a day and builds underwater forests that rival reefs for biodiversity. Along the BC coast, marine heatwaves, sea star disease, and exploding urchin populations are turning those forests to bare rock.
Ocean Life
Mangroves grow where no other tree can, rooted in salt water and oxygen-poor mud. They pack several times the carbon of upland forest into the same area, blunt storm waves, and shelter young fish. Cleared, they flip from carbon sink to carbon source.
Ocean Life
A coral reef is a living structure built by tiny animals. Algae inside the coral feed it and give it its colour. When water warms even slightly past the coral’s limit, the polyps expel the algae and turn white, and if the heat holds, they die. Standing reefs feed fisheries and blunt storm waves.
Indigenous Stewardship
Most conservation funding runs out when the political cycle turns. The Great Bear Sea agreement was built to outlast that: $335 million, an endowment at its core, and Indigenous governance as the foundation, not the recipient.
The Players
A port is not optimized for any single thing it does. It is a negotiation between functions that don’t agree, on timescales that don’t align, conducted by an authority holding five roles at once. How well that goes decides much of the blue economy’s cost.
Industry Profiles
In 2024, Canadian supply chains absorbed strikes, rerouting, drought, and wildfire at once. The exposures behind that year are structural, and they change how port and shipping assets should be financed.
Industry Profiles
Canada’s ports look like public infrastructure, but the capital behind them is a hybrid of self-funding authorities, private operators, and a fast-growing layer of public financing. How money actually moves through the system, why labour is an underpriced risk, and where the investment case sits.
Industry Profiles
Marine transport carries roughly a fifth of Canada’s trade by value, through four corridors that each work differently. How Canadian cargo actually moves, why the ports are landlords and not cargo handlers, and why the whole system runs on rail.
The Players
Reserve land cannot be pledged as collateral, so for generations First Nations were largely locked out of the debt markets. They built their own lender instead, and it now carries an investment-grade rating and finances Indigenous ownership of fisheries, LNG, and coastal infrastructure.
The Players
Banks are the starting point. Behind ocean projects in Canada sits someone absorbing the risk a lender will not take alone: a government guarantee, a development bank, a provincial loan board, an Indigenous finance authority, or patient capital. Knowing who provides it explains what gets built.
Ocean Physics
A few degrees of warming in the northeastern Pacific collapsed fisheries, erased kelp forests, and ran up costs in the billions. What a marine heatwave actually does to the ocean, and why finance still struggles to price it.
Ocean Physics
Climate is usually told as an atmospheric story. It is mostly an ocean one, and once you see why, the case for connecting finance to ocean health stops looking optional.