OTTAWA  —  Canada’s maritime innovators could get unique benefits from working with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, but it’s less and less able to help them because of budget decisions, according to an internal document obtained by The Logic. 

“Dedicated departmental innovation funding has eroded,” said a May briefing note for the department’s top permanent official, deputy minister Paul MacKinnon.

It cited the “loss” of an internal budget used to back trials of new technologies and a special allotment for work with Innovative Solutions Canada—whose job is to help smaller Canadian firms with clever ideas get their products tested and used by the government.

His department was prepping MacKinnon for a meeting with Atlantic Canadian members of tech scale up lobby group the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI), who were introducing themselves in Ottawa. 

Meetings with MacKinnon and Fisheries Minister Joanne Thompson were some of the best the group had that day, Dana O’Born, CCI’s chief strategy officer, said in an interview: “It was just very warm and welcoming, and they greeted us with a lot of interest and curiosity.”

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) might not seem like an obvious target for tech lobbying, but the department needs sensors and drones and ship-based equipment, and could be an important user of artificial intelligence tools for crunching data on everything from ocean temperatures to whale movements, O’Born said.

“Ocean tech sits at the intersection of ocean science, defence, climate, economic growth and economic security,” she said. “I would say probably few sectors touch as many national priorities at once.”

The briefing for MacKinnon reflected that. DFO works in places almost nobody else does, from the deep ocean to the Arctic, which makes it “uniquely positioned to test innovations across diverse operational environments,” the note said.

But it has scrapped its “departmental results fund,” the note went on. The name is dull, but other DFO documents have credited the fund with paying to test prototypes of year-round lighted navigational buoys and for research toward a new geographic information system—a detailed map-based tool loaded with data on fishing areas.

(Despite the briefing for the deputy minister saying the departmental results fund was gone, Naomi Librach, a DFO spokesperson, told The Logic in an email that it had only been renamed to the “deputy minister’s reserve.” The department had a deputy minister’s reserve already at the time, she acknowledged, and it has no fixed amount.)

The result of losing the fund, said the briefing document for the deputy minister, is that people in DFO who want to try out new technologies and tools just have to find the money in their own budgets. There’s nowhere to go for a little extra to fund an experiment.

Backing innovators can also be hard for reasons that aren’t directly about cash, the note said: “Matching innovators with the right departmental stakeholders is difficult, testing innovations in operational settings carries risk, and participation requires significant in-kind investments (personnel, vessels, facilities) that compete with core priorities.”

Many startups working on ocean-oriented technologies have reoriented toward defence because that’s where the money suddenly is, but DFO should be helping Canadian innovators commercialize less military-oriented products, said Scott Beatty, founder and CEO of Victoria’s MarineLabs.

His 10-year-old company offers hyperlocal forecasts of sea conditions based on data from its own sensors and ones it makes and mounts on customers’ equipment.

“We’re talking about wind, wave, fog—things that affect ships coming into ports from a safety as well as an operational point of view,” Beatty said. The information can inform decisions about dispatching tugboats and loading and unloading freighters, and contribute to technical studies for new coastal infrastructure.

The Canadian Coast Guard became a defence agency last year but for a long time was part of Fisheries and Oceans, including when the coast guard tried a 42-sensor system from MarineLabs. Through an Innovative Solutions Canada program, the devices were mounted all along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, Beatty said.

“That trial was successful,” Beatty said. But the trial was where it ended. “Ultimately, what happened was the coast guard didn’t find a program requirement for this innovation, and so asked us to remove all 42.”

MarineLabs looked to the United States and other markets after that, he said. Like many Canadian startups, it’s seeing interest at home after landing customers abroad—including from the coast guard again, now that it’s with the Department of National Defence, though that hasn’t led to anything concrete, Beatty said.

Startups with more science-oriented products, such as for monitoring ocean conditions and sea life, will need DFO in their corner, Beatty said, and good luck to them. “My experience with DFO is that it’s very siloed out, procurement is very slow and opaque, and it’s piecemeal and small, and that there’s a lack of willingness to procure innovation.”

A spokesperson for Thompson, the fisheries minister, said questions about her department’s priorities and spending are outside the minister’s bailiwick.

In an email she said was written by the department, Ira Khedkar pointed to DFO’s use of sea drones, buoys and seafloor platforms to collect a range of data as evidence of its commitment to technological innovation.

DFO is also one of the federal bodies involved in the national “dark vessel” detection program, which uses satellite services from MDA Space to spot ships that aren’t broadcasting their presences—often because they’re fishing or dumping illegally, or are otherwise up to some skulduggery.

“This type of solution-focus is not limited to these programs and continues to be a central focus of the work we do every day,” Khedkar’s email said.