Kendra MacDonald, FCPA, ICD.D

Canada’s oceans and shorelines are a source of biodiversity, food, energy, transport, and resources critical to both our survival and our sovereignty. They’re under increasing threat from climate change, and over-development. As our land based resources have benefited from Canadian cleantech, so now our ocean based resources need made-in-Canada “oceantech” or “bluetech”.
Enter Canada’s Ocean Supercluster: Initially founded and significantly funded as part of the Federal Government’s Innovation Supercluster Initiative, the Ocean Supercluster now has almost 450 industry, government and academic partners who collectively provide now provide close to two thirds of the investment funding.
Under Kendra’s leadership for the past three years, the team has enabled almost $300M in investment in a portfolio of more than 50 globally relevant projects, that enable transformative environmentally sound solutions ranging from fish food for aquaculture farms to better bottom scanning solutions to help offshore windfarms anchor more securely to the ocean floor, to AI enabled marine RADAR. These cleantech ocean projects are built on collaborations from coast-to-coast-to-coast, across sectors, regions, and disciplines, and will both solve some of the world’s biggest challenges in the ocean – and create Canadian companies who can sell solutions worldwide.