Over thirty years in Canadian finance, most recently a credit union Chief Risk Officer, now writing Blue Finance Canada. CFA, MBA, ICD.D.
Industry Profiles
Two Supreme Court rulings settled that Indigenous fishing rights are not the Crown's to hand out or take back. A quarter century later, who actually gets to fish, and where the money goes, is still being fought over on both coasts. The deals that hold are the ones that start there.
Industry Profiles
From the dock, a fishing business looks like boats and gear. Its biggest cost is usually neither: it is the license, and the money to buy one. And its richest market can sit in China one year and disappear on a tariff the next. The money side of Canadian fisheries is stranger than the boats let on.
Industry Profiles
Canada’s fisheries exported CAD 8.47 billion in seafood in 2025. The industry behind that figure runs on shellfish, leans on a few foreign markets, and is quietly aging out of its own workforce.
The Basics
Canada has a very large blue economy. That tells you almost nothing about whether its oceans are being financed well. The two get confused all the time, and the confusion is comfortable, which is exactly the problem.
The Instruments
The Belize and Galápagos transactions worked through in detail: what debt was repurchased and at what price, where the savings came from, who bore which risks, what the conservation covenants oblige after closing, and where the fee and accountability questions sit.
The Instruments
Blended finance brings development and commercial capital into one structure. A proposed World Bank coral bond shows what that structure can change, and what it leaves alone.
The Instruments
A blue bond is a use-of-proceeds bond applied to ocean activities. The repayment promise is contractual. The blue commitments are published, reviewed and reported on, and generally work through a different kind of pressure.
Blue Currents
A monthly update on how finance is connecting to ocean outcomes in Canada.
The Players
Canada has no single authority in charge of ocean conservation. Legal power, money, accountability and the work on the water sit in different hands, and outcomes turn on whether those reach each other
Indigenous Stewardship
In Canada, the path to ocean outcomes runs through Indigenous governance. The arrangements that last are built inside it, and governance left outside a structure can leave it exposed.
The Basics
IFC will treat a fish plant as blue only in jurisdictions enforcing sustainable quotas, and offshore wind only after a year of baseline surveys. What blue finance principles change is how far outside a project a financing decision has to look.
The Basics
Blue carbon is the carbon held in mangroves, tidal marshes and seagrass meadows, in the plants and in the ground they grow in. How much a place holds, how fast it builds, and whether protecting it helps the climate are three separate questions.