Can Canadian Directors Raise Environmental Issues at the Board?
A Canadian director can raise ocean exposure at the board. The harder problem is that the exposure is spread across functions and nobody owns the whole picture.
Latest writing: Page 2
Latest
Who Remembers a Company’s Environmental Record?
A missed payment follows a borrower to the next lender. A fuel spill in a First Nation's fishing grounds usually doesn't. Why environmental history stays behind, and where it travels.
How Do We Know What We Are Doing to the Ocean?
Collecting and processing ocean data has got cheaper and faster. Knowing what we are doing to the ocean has not. Observation, interpretation and assurance are three different problems.
What Financial History Can Teach Us About Blue Finance
Amsterdam in 1609, Lloyd’s coffee house and a Chicago grain elevator all turn on the same question: what has to exist before a stranger will finance something they cannot inspect?
The Ocean Economy Beyond Ocean Industries
The industries that are obviously part of the ocean economy are not hard to identify. They are not the whole story. The ocean economy extends into agriculture, insurance, energy, retail, and municipal finance through pathways that are real and consequential but rarely made explicit.
Blue Carbon: Industry Profile
Blue carbon has the scientific case, the policy intent, and the private capital interest. Progress is still slow. The reason is not lack of ambition. It is that the measurement infrastructure required to make blue carbon credits bankable does not yet exist at the scale the opportunity requires.
Seafood Processing: The Onshore Half of the Fishery
Harvesting gets the attention; processing and distribution capture the value. Across 551 facilities, Canada's processors turn $7.8 billion in revenue into an export trade that runs on certification, cold-chain capital, and currency risk.
How Pension Funds Allocate Ocean Capital
A pension liability and a port terminal share an unusual trait: both run for decades. That makes pension capital a natural home for ocean infrastructure, and Canada's funds already hold it. What they lack is an allocation category that would let them fund the ocean economy on purpose.
Shipbuilding and Naval Infrastructure: Why Canada's Shipbuilding Ambitions Outrun Delivery
In 2020, Canada chartered a foreign icebreaker for Arctic search and rescue while promoting a multi-billion dollar domestic icebreaker program as evidence of sovereignty. Both things were true simultaneously. That is the central tension in Canadian shipbuilding policy.
Shipbuilding and Naval Infrastructure: Finance
Seaspan won a fixed price contract to build three fisheries science vessels, delivered them, and lost significant money in the process. That outcome is not a scandal or an anomaly. It is a precise illustration of how shipbuilding finance actually works in Canada.
Shipbuilding and Naval Infrastructure: The Industry
Canada's National Shipbuilding Strategy is worth approximately CAD 60 billion and represents around 0.1 percent of GDP. That contrast is the starting point for understanding what Canadian shipbuilding actually is and is not.
August 2026
Canada and British Columbia committed $106.5 million to a new fisheries fund. The taxonomy consultation closed on whether Indigenous consent is a condition or a disclosure. Four dry months in Panama turned into fewer ships through the canal.
Ocean Life
Phytoplankton
In September 2019 the water off Newfoundland turned milky blue in the wrong month. What that colour is made of, and why somebody has been sampling the same spot in Halifax Harbour since 1992.
Industry Profiles
Undersea Cables
Nearly all the world's internet traffic runs through cable the width of a garden hose. How it got there, who builds it, why it breaks a couple of hundred times a year, and who goes out to fix it.
Industry Profiles
Deep-Sea Mining
The abyssal plains contain minerals the energy transition genuinely needs. The governance framework for extracting them is unresolved. The ecological consequences are not adequately understood. Mainstream finance and insurance have largely stepped back.
Finance and the Ocean Are One System
A fishing boat belongs to somebody, feeds a family, and rests on a stock that may or may not be there next year. The divisions between those things are ours, not the ocean's.
Industry Profiles
Coastal Tourism: Community, Environment, and the Limits of Growth
The problem is not that any single operator is doing something wrong. The problem is that the sum of individually legitimate decisions can produce outcomes that none of them, assessed alone, would justify. The whale does not appear in any balance sheet.
Taking Stock
Swim, Drink, Fish: Gord Downie and the Water
Ten years after the Tragically Hip's last concert, a look at the ocean in their songs and the water advocacy Gord Downie carried away from the stage. A three-word standard, a decade on a charity board, and a pier across the street from his family home.
Industry Profiles
Coastal Tourism: Finance
Tofino is one of Canada’s most economically successful coastal tourism destinations and one of its least livable communities for the people who make that success possible. That paradox is the entry point for understanding how coastal tourism finance actually works in Canada.
Industry Profiles
Coastal Tourism: The Industry
On a summer morning in Victoria, a cruise ship docks at Ogden Point. A whale watching company loads twelve people onto a rigid inflatable. An Indigenous-led cultural tour is about to begin. All three are coastal tourism. Almost nothing else about their economics is the same.
Can a Bank Be Concentrated in the Ocean?
A bank can be diversified by geography, sector and borrower, yet still depend on the same natural system. Canadian concentration rules do not ask banks to look for that exposure.
The Basics
Who Sets the Rules in Blue Finance
Blue finance has no governing body. The international rules are voluntary, written by five organizations together. Canada is now writing its own, with marine protection scheduled for a later phase.
Where Things Stand
Canadian Banks Have No Ocean Risk Category
Flood, fisheries exposure, port disruption. Each one sits on a bank's register as its own category, and the ocean condition connecting them sits on none of them. What OSFI's climate guidance measures, what it leaves out, and why a risk nobody can measure well ends up mispriced.
Taking Stock
Who Checks That Blue Finance Works
Construction lenders do not release funds until an independent surveyor confirms the work was done. Blue finance has strong mechanisms for tracking where money goes, but much weaker ones for verifying what happened in the water. The capacity to close that gap already exists on Canada’s three coasts.