Industry Profiles
Ninety percent of goods reaching Canada's northern communities arrive by sea in a short summer window. Behind the Northwest Passage headlines, Arctic shipping is a community lifeline with sparse ports and thin economics, not the commercial trade route its reputation suggests.
Where Things Stand
Canada has spent hundreds of millions establishing marine protected areas. The harder question is whether the funding and governance behind them are built to last as long as the protection itself.
The Rules
Not all ocean protection is equal. Less than half a percent of Canadian waters are strongly protected; the rest is a patchwork of partial restrictions across three federal departments and a fourth, looser category. A designated area without staff, budget, and monitoring is just a boundary on a map.
The Rules
More than 120,000 ocean observations flow into global forecasting systems every day, coordinated by a UNESCO body few could describe with precision. The data it maintains is what coastal risk models, catastrophe pricing, and blue finance rely on.
The Rules
The UN Ocean Decade runs from 2021 to 2030 with seven ambitious outcomes. Its real contribution is narrower and more useful: making ocean ignorance less defensible, and lowering the information costs that make ocean-linked financial decisions hard to make well.
Blue Currents
Canada's marine stewardship funding is building out fast, but almost all of it is still public money. This month's signals point to the missing piece: structures that let private capital price ocean risk and come in at scale.
Industry Profiles
Canada has strong Atlantic wind, deep harbours, a skilled offshore workforce, and a US export market next door. What it does not have is an operating turbine, a financed project, or settled transmission. The gap to a working wind farm is measured in years.
Industry Profiles
Offshore petroleum and offshore wind are not two versions of the same business. One runs on corporate balance sheets and a track record; the other is still a projection waiting on transmission, offtake, and a first licensing round. Decommissioning is the long-tail cost most discussion underweights.
Industry Profiles
Newfoundland produces the oil. Nova Scotia is betting on wind it has not yet built. The Pacific is closed by moratorium and surrendered permits, and the Arctic is on indefinite hold. Canadian offshore energy in 2026 is less a national industry than four separate situations.
Taking Stock
Between 2014 and 2016 a mass of unusually warm water settled across the northeast Pacific, and coastal communities paid for it in closures, lost seasons, and work that did not come back. The ocean economy is wider than it looks.
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.