Found in translation: Atlantic Canada's Missing Finance Infrastructure
The tides, the fisheries, the wind: Atlantic Canada's environmental assets are real. The market infrastructure to monetise them is not.
Call me intellectually lazy or just poorly educated, but I’ve never really bothered to understand the bond market. Compared to equities, derivatives or alternative investments, bonds were never sexy enough to interest me.
This week, my bond market education took an unexpected leap, courtesy of what I will call an “AI moment.” My husband asked me to translate a banking article from simplified Chinese into traditional Chinese and English. This is less strange than it sounds: we spent two decades in Hong Kong publishing and editing business magazines, work we’ve continued from our desktops in Canada.
The article was about the explosion in China’s green financial bond market where, in 2025 alone, commercial banks issued ¥1.7 trillion RMB, or roughly $338 billion CAD, in green bonds. From a province facing a $1.3 billion deficit, and a country forecasting a deficit of roughly $78 billion, that scale of finance sounds like a fairy tale.
But this isn’t really a story about bonds. It’s a story about what that number made me want to know: is Canada building anything like the infrastructure that makes that kind of capital flow possible? And is there a pathway for Atlantic Canada to access the pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds that move capital at scale? What I found was more interesting, and more frustrating, than I expected.
What we have
Atlantic Canadians generally don’t appreciate that we are sitting on an extraordinary concentration of globally valuable environmental assets. These are not scenery. They are productive capital: things that can generate measurable, certifiable, recurring economic value if structured correctly.
The Bay of Fundy’s tides are the most obvious example. For over two decades, developers, governments, and research institutions have been trying to turn that potential into power, and the resource has never been in doubt. But the tidal story is not a story of failed technology or absent ambition. It is a 20-year illustration of what happens when a world-class asset lacks financial infrastructure. That gap runs across every major environmental asset Atlantic Canada possesses.
Clearwater Seafoods, now owned by the Mi’kmaw Nation and Premium Brands, operates one of the most sustainably certified shellfish businesses on the planet. That MSC certification is not just an environmental achievement; it is a market position. Certified sustainable food systems are increasingly treated as an investible asset class. Atlantic Canada has several.
New Brunswick is sitting on critical minerals, including tungsten and molybdenum with direct applications in clean energy technology, as well as significant offshore wind potential and coastal carbon assets. The province’s current strategy focuses on mining and port logistics, projects that conventional finance can already see and price. The environmental assets remain off the balance sheet, not because they are less valuable, but because the market infrastructure to bring them to scale doesn’t exist.
Nova Scotia has done the most visible regulatory work on offshore wind: a new joint federal-provincial regulator, a prequalification process for developers, and this week, Premier Tim Houston introduced the Powering the Economy Act, establishing a revenue framework for provincial fees on offshore wind projects. These are real steps but designing how to collect revenue is not the same as designing how to finance construction. Nova Scotia has built a tollbooth, financing the road remains under discussion.
What’s missing
Canada is not starting from zero. The Canada Infrastructure Bank and the federal Major Projects Office provide capital for specific projects, and they matter. But project-by-project government funding is not the same as a functioning market. Atlantic Canada already has a sympathetic federal ear. What we don’t have is the architecture that allows institutional investors to find, evaluate, and price our environmental assets without being walked through them one by one: a taxonomy, verified natural capital accounting, aggregation vehicles that bundle projects to investible scale. The difference is between a government that will sometimes write a cheque and a market that prices assets every day.
In December, Investment Executive, a Canadian publication for finance executives, reported that Canada’s sustainable finance taxonomy, described by those leading its development as “long-awaited,” had finally been commissioned, with the Canadian Climate Institute tapped to lead the work. Priority sectors are not expected to be finalised until late 2026 at the earliest, with three more to follow in fall 2027. For context: Australia began its taxonomy after Canada and published a final version in June 2025.
Scotland faced the same structural gap as Atlantic Canada with its own tidal resources and made a deliberate decision to close it. It created a marine leasing framework, guaranteed minimum prices that gave tidal developers bankable revenue projections, and publicly funded feasibility work to absorb early-stage risk. Institutional capital now flows to Scottish tidal projects, not because Scotland’s tides are better than Fundy’s, but because Scotland built the market.
Canadian pension funds alone, known colloquially as the Maple 8, are considered the gold standard in global institutional investment circles. The big four: CPP Investments, CDPQ (Quebec’s public pension fund), OMERS (Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System), and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan collectively manage roughly $1.7 trillion (as of Dec 2025) and are committed to increasing green infrastructure allocations. Much of that capital is currently flowing to Scotland, to North Sea wind, to blue carbon projects in Belize and Indonesia. It is not flowing to Atlantic Canada. That absence is not a commentary on our assets. It is a commentary on our architecture.
What this series is about
Atlantic Canada has long treated its natural environment as compensation for economic disadvantage: the ocean sunsets, lakes, parks and forests held up as consolation prizes for lower wages and fewer opportunities. A Chinese banking article about green bonds helped confirm a suspicion I’ve had for a while: that framing our environment as a substitute for the quality of life we want has been costly, and the cost is concrete and cumulative.
In the instalments that follow, we will look at what we have, what infrastructure is missing, who would need to build it, and what we stand to gain. Our assets are not the problem. They should be our leading edge.
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AI generated summary: A translation exercise involving a Chinese banking article on green bonds leads to a larger question: is Canada building the financial infrastructure that allows institutional investors to find and price environmental assets at scale? Atlantic Canada, the piece argues, sits on an extraordinary concentration of productive natural capital — tidal energy, certified sustainable seafood, critical minerals, offshore wind — but lacks the market architecture to monetise it. The difference between Atlantic Canada and jurisdictions that have attracted major green investment, notably Scotland, is not the quality of the assets. It is the presence of a taxonomy, natural capital accounting, and aggregation vehicles that make those assets legible to global capital. Canada's sustainable finance taxonomy, described as "long-awaited" by those leading its development, was only commissioned in December 2025. This is the first in a series examining what Atlantic Canada has, what infrastructure is missing, and what the region stands to gain if it is built.