Fishing, hunting and trapping

On the BC coast the licence and quota cost more than the fishing earns, which is the whole screen: quota has been capitalised into an asset held largely by non-fishing owners, and the active harvester leases it at a share of the landed value that leaves the boat with the risk and a thin margin. Entering means either buying an asset priced as a security or renting one from someone who already owns it. The sector's software is screened separately at the same code.

The record at Commercial Fishing Licence & Quota screened the Pacific model, where quota became a leased financial asset. This group is mostly the other coast: 68% of the 4,828 establishments are in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and 85% have one to four employees — a boat, a captain and a crew. The fishery itself is excellent. Canadian sea fisheries landed C$3.608B in 2023, of which lobster alone was C$1.76B [A]. The cut is that the Atlantic inshore has been closed to exactly the kind of entrant this research serves. The owner-operator and fleet-separation policies are no longer policy but regulation: an inshore licence can be issued only to an individual, a company that individual wholly owns, or an organisation holding an allocation for its membership, and it will not be issued to anyone who has transferred its use or control [A]. An investor cannot own the licence, a processor cannot own the boat, and a side agreement that tries is grounds for losing it. What remains is buying out a retiring harvester personally — and brokers on Prince Edward Island reported licence, boat and gear packages reaching C$1.8M [B], a price that already capitalises the lobster boom into the seller's pension. The offshore, where companies may hold licences, trades in blocks like the C$1B Clearwater sale [A]. The software sold to this fleet is screened separately.

The pre-screen said licence-bound and tiny; the numbers say tiny is the operative word. Entry is cheap — a trapper's course, a licence, a registered line or a landowner's permission, a snowmobile and steel. What is missing is revenue. The Fur Institute of Canada's compilation of provincial wildlife-agency returns puts all wild fur sold in Canada in 2023–24 at 330,710 pelts worth C$12.76M, down from 916,572 pelts and C$48.96M in 2012–13 [B]. That is the whole country's crop, shared among every licensed trapper, and it would not make one mid-sized business. The Northwest Territories, which markets its fur actively, reported 7,421 pelts sold for C$582,043 across the entire 2025 season — and pays trappers a start-up grubstake of up to C$2,000 to keep them on the land [A]. Price is set at a single auction in North Bay by a handful of international buyers; in June 2025 muskrat averaged C$1.99 and beaver C$15.18. Trapping persists as culture, wildlife management and side income, not as an enterprise, which is why 75% of the 116 establishments have one to four employees and none has fifty. The money adjacent to this code — guided hunts for non-residents — is classified with hunting and fishing camps at 721212 and was not screened here. Game preserves were not separately researched.