Nine industries, from fisheries to blue carbon, make up Canada's ocean economy. This series profiles each, then reads them together for the patterns headline numbers miss: announced capacity that never arrives, and scale that hides financial fragility.
Industry Profiles
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.
Industry Profiles
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.
Industry Profiles
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.
Industry Profiles
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.
