August 2026

The Blue Register

August shows only modest movement in our assessment of blue finance in Canada. At 29 out of 100, the Blue Register remains in the Emerging stage.

Public capital increased this month with a new fisheries fund from Canada and British Columbia. Private capital committed and deployed remains at zero, and no blue finance instrument is yet live in the Canadian market.

That gap between public commitment and broader private participation remains the central feature of the assessment. Definitions and methodology are available on the Blue Register methodology page.

What's Happening

A smaller B.C. fisheries fund with a longer list of jobs

Canada and British Columbia committed $106.5 million over five years to the British Columbia Fisheries Fund on August 20, with Ottawa providing 60 per cent and B.C. 40 per cent. It covers innovation, infrastructure, scientific partnerships, market development and salmon restoration. The program it replaces, the British Columbia Salmon Restoration and Innovation Fund, put more than $250 million through 170 projects over seven years, which is roughly $36 million a year against about $21 million now. Less money, more purposes. Money for processing equipment can improve a company’s productive asset base in ways a lender can assess. Money for habitat restoration improves the resource that company depends on and may never appear in its financial statements. Both belong in the program, and they will need to be judged separately.

Source: Fisheries and Oceans Canada

The taxonomy consultation closed on who has to agree

Canada's Sustainable Finance Taxonomy consultation ended August 13. The draft sets out green, transition and abatement categories, with Do No Significant Harm criteria and minimum social safeguards. The Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs argued that a project should not qualify while disclosing incomplete alignment with those safeguards, and that UNDRIP compliance, including free, prior and informed consent, belongs at the threshold instead. That is a finance question. If consent is a threshold, it becomes work a project has to finish before capital can carry the label, and it prices into the timeline. If it is a disclosure, an investor can be told about unresolved rights and proceed. Coastal and marine projects routinely intersect with Indigenous rights and title, so this is where the distinction becomes especially consequential.

Sources: Taxonomy Draft Methodology, UBCIC Submission

Rainfall in Panama turned into fewer ships a day

Rain across the Panama Canal watershed ran 34 per cent below the historical average from May through August, and watershed inflows 44 per cent below. On August 20 the Canal Authority issued Advisory A-29-2026, cutting daily transit slots to 34 for booking dates from September 4 and to 32 from September 15. In May the Authority had said it was not planning transit restrictions this year. What the advisory is actually worried about is the dry season that runs from January to April 2027, and the El Niño forecast to deepen before then. Nature-related financial risk is usually described as hard to quantify and slow to arrive. Here the chain runs from rainfall to lake level to the number of ships that can cross in a day, and the Authority reversed its own position in four months.

Source: Panama Canal Authority, Advisory A-29-2026

Seven years of killer whale recovery, and one measure complete

The federal progress report on Northern and Southern Resident Killer Whale recovery covers 2017 through February 2024. Of 98 recovery measures, one is recorded as complete and 92 as in progress. In areas under timed salmon closures, landed commercial value fell about 68 per cent from the pre-closure baseline to 2023, against roughly 22 per cent coastwide. The report then says the closures cannot be separated from a declining salmon stock, which is the useful part. Canada is being asked to build financial instruments that pay against measurable ocean outcomes. On one of Canada’s longest-running and most closely watched marine recovery files, seven years in, nobody can say which decision produced the result.

Source: Fisheries and Oceans Canada

Illegal fishing is a financing problem before it is an enforcement problem

A UBC-led paper in PNAS estimates that industrial fleets account for roughly 82 to 93 per cent of an annual illicit marine catch of 8.4 to 15.4 million tonnes, worth US$6.2 billion to US$12.2 billion. About two thirds of the trade by value starts in West Africa, East Asia and Southeast Asia, and much of the consumption happens in wealthier markets. The authors point to harmful subsidies, opaque beneficial ownership, transshipment and weak port controls as what keeps it running. Vessels have to be financed, insured, fuelled and owned through something, and processors and retailers have to buy the catch. A Canadian bank with no blue product at all still touches this through vessel lending, trade finance, marine insurance and who it accepts as a borrower.

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

What It All Means

August was not an inflection point for Canadian blue finance. What changed was the clarity of the problem.

The B.C. Fisheries Fund shows government continuing to finance adaptation, productivity and stewardship directly. The taxonomy debate shows Canada beginning to decide which environmental and Indigenous conditions determine whether capital can be called sustainable. The killer whale report shows how hard it is to connect spending and restrictions to measurable outcomes, and Panama shows how fast that connection runs when the physical dependency is simple enough to see. The illegal fishing work shows the ocean reaching finance through ordinary lending, insurance and supply chains, with no blue label anywhere in sight.

Those are all pieces of financial architecture, and they sit around the market instead of inside it. The step that would matter is when these conditions start changing ordinary financial decisions: a lender pricing ocean risk, an investor requiring rights and ecological safeguards before committing, a public program leading a business into commercial capital. August gave more evidence about what that system would need to do, and none that it is doing it.

Upcoming Events

Third Annual Sustainable Blue Economy Summit

Halifax, September 18. The program puts capital, policy and ocean innovation in the same room, with National Bank Capital Markets among the participants. Worth listening for whether the conversation has moved from investment readiness to actual transaction structures.
Source: Ocean Alliance Canada

Fifth National Indigenous Fisheries and Aquaculture Forum

Kjipuktuk/Halifax, September 22 to 24. The Forum treats Indigenous fisheries and aquaculture as economic development, and puts Indigenous industry leaders, governments and private-sector participants together on access, ownership and capital formation.
Source: National Indigenous Fisheries & Aquaculture Forum

From Blue Finance Canada

Finance and the Ocean Are One System
The premise everything else here rests on, written out properly. Start with this one if you are new.

Can a Bank Be Concentrated in the Ocean?
Credit committees test concentration by industry, geography and borrower, and none of those would catch a portfolio resting on one body of water. A coastal lender could hold that exposure today with no report showing it.

A Note to Readers

Blue Finance Canada is better when it draws on people who know these issues firsthand. If there is a question you think deserves a closer look, an issue I am missing, or a part of the ocean economy you would like to see explored, send me a note at brian@bluefinance.ca.

I am also interested in hearing from people working directly in the areas covered here. If you have experience or a perspective that could inform a future piece and would be willing to talk, I would be glad to hear from you. I cannot promise to pursue every suggestion, and they will help direct what I look at next.