Why Is Seafood So Expensive In Canada?
NewsWhy is seafood so expensive in Canada when we're surrounded by three oceans? The answer has less to do with fish and more to do with how our seafood system was built.
by Sonia Strobel
Canada has the longest coastline in the world and is surrounded by three oceans. So why is seafood still so expensive?
The short answer is that seafood prices are influenced by global demand, exports, transportation, labour, processing costs, and the complex supply chains that separate most Canadians from the people who catch their seafood.
But there's a deeper reason too.
Much of Canada's seafood system was built to export seafood to distant markets, not to help Canadians access local seafood close to home. Understanding why seafood is expensive means understanding how our seafood system was built, who benefits from it, and what it would take to build something better.
1. Canada's Seafood System Was Built for Export, Not Local Food Security
Most Canadians assume that living in a fishing nation should mean easy access to local seafood. Yet the opposite is often true.
Many Canadians struggle to find seafood harvested close to home. Instead, grocery stores are often stocked with imported shrimp, foreign farmed salmon, south-pacific tuna, and seafood products that have travelled thousands of kilometres before reaching our plates. Meanwhile, up to 90% of the seafood harvested in Canadian waters is shipped overseas.
How did we end up here? Part of the answer lies in history.
For thousands of years, Indigenous Peoples harvested seafood from the waters now known as Canada to feed their communities, support local economies, and sustain trade networks. Seafood was part of a living food system rooted in place, reciprocity, stewardship, and relationship.
The arrival of European colonial economies transformed that system.
Over time, fisheries became increasingly organized around extraction and export. Fish, shellfish, and other marine resources were harvested and shipped to distant markets, generating wealth far from the communities where those resources originated.
In many ways, that legacy still shapes the seafood system we have today.
The system is not broken; it is largely producing the outcomes it was designed to produce. It is highly effective at moving seafood from coastal regions to distant markets and concentrating value within global supply chains.
What it’s less effective at doing is ensuring that local people can easily access local seafood or that the benefits of the fishery remain in fishing communities. Research by Skipper Otto’s Sustainable Fisheries Researcher Jeff Scott found that today, Canada exports approximately 90% of its fish and seafood production, while Canadians continue to rely heavily on imported seafood – up to 80% of what we eat is imported.
If we want different outcomes, we need to build a different system. One that strengthens local food security, supports working harvesters, respects Indigenous leadership and knowledge, and reconnects Canadians with seafood harvested in Canadian waters.
2. Long Supply Chains Mean Higher Prices
Most consumers never see the journey seafood takes before reaching their plate. A fish may pass through multiple hands before it reaches a grocery store or restaurant:
Harvester → Buyer → Processor → Distributor → Wholesaler → Retailer → Consumer
Every step may add value, but it also adds cost.
Long supply chains can also make transparency more difficult. Oceana Canada investigations found seafood mislabelling rates of 46% and 47% in separate Canadian studies. Shorter supply chains can create more transparency, more accountability, and more value for both harvesters and consumers.
Many people assume that buying directly from harvesters should automatically mean cheaper seafood. Sometimes it can. But that's not always the point.
The goal of a shorter supply chain isn't simply to remove costs. It's to make sure more of the value reaches the people doing the work. In many conventional food systems, consumers pay high prices while producers receive only a small share of the final value. A shorter supply chain can help rebalance that equation. Rather than increasing profits for intermediaries, more of the seafood dollar can stay with harvesters, processors, and the workers who handle seafood along the way.
At the same time, large industrial seafood businesses often benefit from economies of scale. They may purchase packaging in larger volumes, spread administrative costs across more products, and operate highly centralized distribution systems. Those efficiencies can reduce certain costs.
The result is that a shorter, more transparent supply chain does not automatically produce the lowest price. What it can produce is a system where consumers have greater visibility into where their money goes and where more of the value remains with the people and communities closest to the resource.
The result isn't necessarily cheaper seafood. Instead, it can be a more transparent, equitable, and resilient food system. And that's a different kind of value. The lowest price and the fairest system are not always the same thing.
3. The Cost Most Consumers Never See: Who Owns Access to the Fishery?
There is another factor influencing seafood prices that many Canadians have never heard about: Who owns access to the fishery?
In British Columbia, many commercial fisheries operate under systems of licences and quota that determine who can harvest fish and how much they can catch. Research on the BC halibut fishery, as referenced within Dr. Villy Christensen’s brief to the House of Commons, found that lease fees have regularly exceeded 80% of the landed value of the catch.
Imagine a farmer paying 80% of the value of their crop simply for the right to plant it.
These costs do not disappear but instead become part of the economics of every pound of seafood sold.
This Is Personal To Us
My husband Shaun grew up fishing alongside his dad, Otto. When I married into the family and started learning how the industry worked, I was shocked by how little of the value of the fishery was actually reaching the people doing the work.
At the end of a fishing season, Otto and other harvesters would sometimes sit down with their books and discover that their expenses were greater than their revenues. Lavonne, Otto's wife, used to joke that she wasn't willing to financially support his "fishing habit" through retirement.
Canadians were paying high prices for seafood, yet many fishing families were struggling to stay afloat. That conundrum eventually led us to start Skipper Otto.
4. Wild Seafood Is One of the Last Truly Wild Foods
Unlike chicken, pork, or beef, wild fish cannot simply be produced on demand. Every fish harvested from a healthy wild fishery represents years of ecosystem productivity.
What Are We Really Paying For?
When we buy seafood, we're buying more than protein. We're paying for a system. And every seafood purchase helps shape the kind of seafood system we leave to future generations.
Perhaps the better question isn't: "Why is seafood so expensive in Canada?" Perhaps the better question is: "What would it take to build a seafood system that works better for harvesters, Indigenous Nations, communities, and consumers alike?"
And that's a conversation we think is worth having.
Sources Cited
https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0385500
https://sencanada.ca/en/content/sen/committee/451/pofo/22ev-57604-e
https://www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/consultation/fm-gp/socio-econ/docs/gp-report-rapport-eng.html