Canada: Natural resources powerhouse or lightweight?

You will constantly here people refer to Canada as a ‘natural resources powerhouse’ and with some justification. If you took away the country’s oil and gas, mining, agriculture, fish and other ‘natural’ resources there wouldn’t be much left. Sure, you would have that large services economy but much of that is as a result of the economic contribution of the resources.

I am concerned that we are collectively losing our appetite for natural resources development.

If you look at the GDP from aquaculture in recent years it has hardly budged and in places like New Brunswick it has gone down.

There was a recent CBC story decrying the vast land area allocated to blueberries in an area in northeastern New Brunswick. Have you looked at potato country recently? Or Saskatchewan? The only difference is that the blueberry fields are more colourful.

Nova Scotia’s attempt to move forward on offshore wind energy is already facing headwinds.

I have written ad nauseum about the problems of getting new mining projects.

Aquaculture is quite annoying, really. New Brunswick was one of the first jurisdictions to develop a major finfish aquaculture sector in the western hemisphere in the early 1990s. It has hardly increased its economic impact since. We have added some smaller scale shellfish aquaculture but GDP data shows a decrease in economic activity recent years.

Nova Scotia and Newfoundland with vast coastlines have very little aquaculture. PEI, as in many things, is doing much better - generating 4X GDP from aquaculture per km of coastline compared to NS and 8.6X compared to NL.

This chart shows the trend in regional GDP contribution from aquaculture. I present it in four year increments because for some reason there can be big swings from year to year.

According to the FAO, aquaculture production has tripled around the world since the early 2000s.

We have this massive oceans supercluster spending hundreds of millions of dollars to grow the economic contribution from our oceans - and how much is going to boost aquaculture production so we can ‘feed the world’? A see a few small projects involving tech but where is the ambition? Where are the breakthrough ideas?

One of the most interesting ideas in aquaculture these days is deep water farming. How much of that experimentation is going on in this region? How much $$ is government pumping in to catalyze next generation fish farming? Based on a recent interview Don and I did for Insights, I fear not much. I am told the Bay of Fundy is particularly interested for the deeper sea farming.

If you don’t like wind turbines, holes in the ground, cutting down trees, planting blueberries, farming fish, pulling gas out of the ground, what would you prefer? Because the vision of New Brunswick has large retirement village will not cut the mustard. We will not generate nearly enough tax revenue to sustainably fund public services with the ‘retirement village’ vision for this province.