Commercial Fishing Licence & Quota
The industry — Fishing, hunting and trapping
Base industry report for 114 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 4,944
- Under 10 employeesA
- 96%
- Establishments · USA
- 3,071
- Employment · USA
- 7,243
- Payroll · USA
- $533M
Of 4,944 Canadian establishments with employees, 96% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Structure decidesThe binding constraint is not executional. Being better than the incumbent does not, by itself, get you in — this one is cleared with capital, an asset, or a permission.
Raise or borrow the entry ticket, or buy an operator who has already paid it. The barrier is money rather than permission, so it yields to a balance sheet — and an acquisition is usually cheaper than a start.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 3
The binding constraint — entry cost
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.
Access is allocated by fishery and area, and quota can only be fished where it is issued. Sized by the quota held, not by the coastline.
Sectors joined: Ocean Tech
[UNVERIFIED] Sector-to-NAICS mapping is analyst judgment — see data/angel-sector-map.json. Counts are a per-record cross-reference and are not additive across records.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
The field
Every operator named on this record, and what each one discloses. A private single-site operator discloses nothing, which is the normal case — the listed consolidators are the only window in.
Competitor set · 4 named · 0 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| BC processor-wholesalers (181 companies)A | not disclosed | — | DFO counted 181 firms processing and wholesaling wild fish in BC in 2024. They are the buyer, not a rival boat — but they take the C$184M between landed and wholesale value, and they set the price an entrant's catch fetches. |
| Clearwater Seafoods (Premium Brands Holdings, TSX: PBH, with a Mi'kmaq First Nations coalition)A | not disclosed | — | The one Canadian licence bundle with a public price: about C$1B including debt, January 2021. Offshore and vertically integrated, so it is a ceiling benchmark rather than a comparable for a single Pacific quota. |
| The other eligibility holders in the same fishery and areaA | not disclosed | — | 4,944 Canadian fishing, hunting and trapping enterprises with employees, 4,207 of them with one to four. Access is capped by fishery and area, so an entrant's competitive set is the fixed list of holders in its own licence area — not a national field. |
| Canadian Fishing Company (Canfisco) / Ocean FisheriesC | not disclosed | — | Named from general knowledge as long-standing BC harvester-processors. Neither ownership nor scale was researched for this record — treat as unverified. |
Nobody here publishes revenue. The market is not sized for that reason — an estimate built on nothing would only look like knowledge.
Evidence
Evidence. Landed value by province for 2023 was read in Fisheries and Oceans Canada's own seafisheries table (BC C$452,504 thousand; Canada C$3,607,641 thousand) [A]. The 2024 landed-to-wholesale figures, the count of 181 BC processor-wholesalers, the ~100 small craft harbours and the fishery mix were read on DFO Pacific's economic-analysis page reporting Counterpoint Consulting's 2025 Harvester–Wholesaler Linkages study [A]. The 2023 and 2024 BC landed-value figures are not the same measurement — C$452.5M is DFO's seafisheries series, C$367M is the study's 2024 wild-harvest basis excluding aquaculture — and the gap between them should not be read as a 19% collapse. The Clearwater price is from the acquirers' completion release [A]. Not sourced, and the record's central claim: UNVERIFIED. No quota lease-rate series was opened. That quota has been capitalised into an asset held largely by non-fishing owners, and that the active harvester leases it at a share of landed value thin enough to leave the boat with the risk, is the mechanism this screen cuts on and it rests on analyst judgment, not on a document read here. DFO publishes licence eligibilities and landings but not quota ownership or lease prices. Also not examined: Atlantic inshore access, which is screened separately at 1141, and Indigenous communal-commercial licences. The cut factor is analyst judgment.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
Union of BC commercial fishermen, tendermen and shoreworkers since 1945; in-season bulletins and access-to-fish advocacy. News posted to Dec 2025. No member count stated.
Umbrella body since 1999: 12 full members are fishing associations of licence holders, vessel owners and crews, plus 13 processor and 6 associate members; says it represents 5,000+ individuals.
National federation of owner-operator harvester organisations; BC members include Area A Crab, BC Longline and BC Shrimp Trawl associations. Says it speaks for 14,000+ licensed owner-operators.
Peer network started by fishers in 2012 and hosted by the T. Buck Suzuki Foundation; resources on licensing and business, plus an annual BCYFN Gathering. bcyoungfishermen.ca redirects here.
The West Coast commercial fishing and marine trade show; Nov 19-21, 2026, Seattle Convention Center. Run by National Fisherman's publisher.
US commercial-fishing trade magazine with a West Coast & Pacific section; daily news, NF+ paid membership tier for readers.
Pacific Fishing magazine (pacificfishing.com) no longer answers connections and was dropped.
Software serving this industry
Vertical software markets filed along the same branch of NAICS — who sells to these businesses, and who an entrant would have to displace.
Other records in this industry
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.