Latest news with #U.S.LumberCoalition
Vancouver Sun
20-07-2025
- Business
- Vancouver Sun
Trump could crush Canada's softwood exports. Here's how a new crisis could play out
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Canada-U.S. softwood lumber trade relationship has dealt with ups and downs, disputes and resolutions, for decades . Anxiety for Canadian exporters is reaching a fever pitch again as the U.S. threatens to more than double softwood lumber duties and add even steeper tariffs under a national security investigation. Canadian foresters, mills, and governments that enjoy taxes, economic spinoffs and stumpage fees from Crown land will feel the pain if they lose too much access to the massive U.S. market. But larger producers have been preparing for just this kind of contingency and have cleverly hedged their bets, building capacity in the U.S., where they can sell as much as they want to Americans, tariff-free. Canadian firms will soon receive word from the U.S. Commerce Department's Sixth Administrative Review (AR6) of U.S. countervailing and anti-dumping duties on Canadian softwood lumber exports, with the rate expected to jump from around 14 per cent to roughly 34 per cent. For Canfor, the Vancouver-based lumber giant selected as a mandatory respondent in the AR6 review, it will be even worse. Its duties are calculated based on its own shipments and prices, not an industry average, like it is for other companies. Start your day with a roundup of B.C.-focused news and opinion. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sunrise will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. 'Canfor's rate will be 45 per cent, plus or minus a per cent,' said Andrew Miller, chairman of Oregon-based Stimson Lumber and chair of the U.S. Lumber Coalition. 'So they'll get a kick in the teeth from the next round of duties.' Then there's the threat of tariffs from President Donald Trump's ongoing national security investigation of Canadian lumber imports under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act , which he ordered in March and is due late this year. Currently, lumber shipments are exempted from Trump's baseline tariffs, because they're covered by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal (USMCA), but that could soon change based on the findings of the 232 probe. National Post breaks down the position of the two countries, what the impacts could be, and how Canadian producers are trying to mitigate the potential damage of punitive trade barriers. The U.S. Lumber Coalition is playing for keeps. It backs higher anti-dumping duties and tariffs for what it sees as a subsidized domestic industry. It claims Canadian producers don't pay market rates for stumpage because their forests are publicly owned and provincial governments set the stumpage rates, while U.S. producers face higher market rates. But it doesn't stop there: the U.S. coalition also wants to see Canada's U.S. market share significantly chopped. Miller isn't shy about the goals: 'A countrywide quota with no exemptions and no carveouts, and a single-digit market share' for Canadian lumber. Today, Canada has a 25 per cent market share, with exports of 12 billion feet of softwood lumber to the U.S. each year, according to the coalition. Softwood lumber accounts for about 7.5 per cent of Canadian exports; in 2023, the U.S. was the destination for 68 per cent of those forestry products . The whole industry is worth about $33.4 billion in sales annually and employs more than 200,000 workers across Canada, according to a report this year from RBC. If Trump stacked a 20 per cent tariff on top of the existing duties, driving down some of Canada's approximately 12 billion board feet of annual softwood exports to the U.S., Miller believes the U.S. industry could almost immediately replace at least two billion feet worth through quick operational changes. Incremental mill upgrades over three years could then add another three to four billion feet of production, he said. 'I really believe that within three years we would have replaced, through U.S. production of lumber, about half of what Canada currently exports to the U.S.,' he said, nodding to Trump's comments earlier this year about the U.S. not needing any Canadian lumber . The coalition is pushing for a tariff rate from the Section 232 investigation that starts at 15 to 20 per cent and goes higher from there. That, Miller explained, will incentivize U.S. sawmill owners struggling with thin margins to hire more people and invest in upgrades, bolstering U.S. production. This week, provincial leaders offered ways to settle the dispute. B.C. Premier David Eby said Canada is willing to consider a quota on exports to the U.S. for the first time , and New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt also said quotas are on the table as an option for trade negotiations. Miller, head of the American coalition, was far from impressed by Eby's comments. A quota might stabilize the market and secure jobs for Canadian workers, he said, but 'at whose expense?' His answer: 'U.S. mill workers.' '(Eby) is not serious about a settlement that is satisfactory to the coalition. He is floating a political trial balloon designed to derail the implementation of the AR6,' he said. Kurt Niquidet, president of the BC Lumber Trade Council, refused to comment on what his organization prefers by way of a solution. He said options included quotas, tariffs, or a hybrid approach. But he was clear that the industry wants Ottawa to resolve things with the U.S. quickly. 'We think that the federal government should be making this issue a priority and looking for a negotiated settlement,' he said. Niquidet argues that the U.S. already has 'housing affordability issues' and taxing or restricting Canadian lumber could only make things worse. 'If the trade measures are too punitive, it just serves to drive up the prices and the costs of lumber in the U.S.,' he said. That's why the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), the trade association based in Washington, has been leading the charge to fight the duties and potential tariffs. It has repeatedly warned the White House that tariffs would only '(slow) down the domestic residential construction industry' at a time when Trump has vowed to address the country's 'severe housing shortage and affordability crisis.' In recent years, tariffs have increased the average home price by nearly US$11,000 because of recent tariffs, according to the April 2025 NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, when the average home sticker price is just north of US$400,000. There are also about 3.5 million Americans who work in the residential housing sector, and millions more working in commercial and industrial construction. The NAHB has actively shared its concerns as part of the Section 232 investigation process and expressed concern that the U.S. lumber supply cannot meet the needed demand on its own anytime soon. Niquidet agrees. He said claims by the U.S. industry and the president that American producers can make up for lost Canadian supply are 'just not true.' The twist in all this is that a growing number of producers in the U.S. are actually Canadian-owned. Vancouver-based West Fraser started buying and investing in U.S. sawmills back in the early 2000s to diversify its assets and shore up supplies threatened in Canada by mountain pine beetles and wildfires. Others — including Canfor, Resolute and Interfor (whose U.S. operations are bigger than its Canadian ones) — followed suit in part to avoid trade barriers, the trend only accelerating in Trump's first term, when he imposed 20 per cent tariffs on Canadian softwood exports. Today, estimates are that Canadian lumber firms control as much 40 per cent of softwood lumber production capacity in the American South. In most cases, they've kept local families and employees in place, seamlessly taking over and often modernizing while keeping afloat many sawmills that might've otherwise gone under. When asked about the paradox of Canadian firms buying up U.S. sawmills, Miller doesn't have any concerns. 'A dollar invested in a U.S. sawmill is a dollar invested in a U.S. sawmill employing U.S. citizens operating that sawmill, cutting trees and shipping them,' he said. 'We don't care who operates them. You know, it's a free market.' (However, Miller said if foreign owners ever wanted to join the U.S. Lumber Coalition, which advocates against imports, it wouldn't allow them to.) The U.S. president has also repeatedly told foreign manufacturers that if they want to escape punitive trade measures, they should invest on U.S. soil and help ramp up domestic American production. '(Trump would) take that as a big victory,' Miller said of the lumber takeovers by Canadians. 'That's what he wants,' National Post tmoran@ Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here .
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Fight over lumber tariffs could reshape future of US home building
Lumber is in the spotlight as the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the U.S. Lumber Coalition disagree over what's behind the U.S. housing market slump. FOX Business correspondent Kelly Saberi reported Monday that the NAHB has pointed to tariff uncertainty and lumber prices as being partly responsible. The U.S.'s current anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duty on imported Canadian softwood lumber stands at 14.5%. It could potentially climb later in the year to nearly 35%. Canada's softwood lumber makes up roughly 85% of America's imports and almost a quarter of the U.S. supply, according to the NAHB. "I share President Trump's desire to create fair and balanced trade across our borders, certainly would bring back as much production as we can," NAHB CEO Jim Tobin said. "But until we do that, and it will take years and millions of dollars of investment, we need to make sure that we have a reliable, affordable source of lumber." Saberi reported that the U.S. Lumber Coalition "says that the price of lumber says something different about this story." Read On The Fox Business App Between May 2021 and April of this year, the random lengths framing composite price decreased 67%, she reported. It stood at $442 per 1,000 board feet as of May 23, per the NAHB. Meanwhile, the price of new homes has gone up 21%, Saberi reported. "Everything from regulatory costs to the cost of land and, quite frankly, also the cost of home builder profitability rates that have gone up, those are actually the driving forces of home affordability," U.S. Lumber Coalition executive director Zoltan van Heyningen told FOX Business. "Lumber just isn't one of them." Click Here To Read More On Fox Business The U.S. Lumber Coalition has also been critical of Canada, saying that "ongoing unfair trade practices" by its lumber industry have been "extremely harmful to U.S. lumber producers, workers, and their forest-dependent communities." John Kalabich, the owner of Acme Lumber in Chicago, told Saberi he was able to keep prices relatively flat over the past 12 months because of the duty on Canadian lumber. He has also heard from contractors that the demand for small repair work and big-ticket construction has gone down. Trump Issues Executive Orders Addressing Lumber Production, National Security Concerns Last month, the U.S. Census Bureau said single-family housing starts suffered a 2.1% decline from March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 927,000 in April. Sales of new single-family homes in April came in at a seasonally adjusted rate of 743,000, while sales of existing ones were 3.63 article source: Fight over lumber tariffs could reshape future of US home building
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
U.S. set to significantly hike softwood lumber duties against Canada
The U.S. is set to more than double the duty it charges on softwood lumber imports from Canada, with the planned new rate set at 34.45 per cent, up from the previous 14.54 per cent. While the preliminary determination was not immediately posted to the U.S. Federal Register, it was confirmed in statements from the B.C. premier's office and the U.S. Lumber Coalition, a trade industry body. New softwood lumber duties were long-feared amid the growing trade war between Canada and the U.S., and would be the latest blow to B.C.'s beleaguered forestry industry, which has seen thousands of workers laid off over the last few years. B.C. Premier David Eby condemned the planned duty hike as an "attack on forest workers and British Columbians" in a statement on Saturday."In Canada, the continued unjustified softwood lumber duties, combined with additional U.S. tariffs and other trade actions, have united Canadians," he wrote. "We have friends and family in the United States who need Canadian lumber to build or rebuild their homes, and both Canadians and Americans need an end to this trade dispute." Under the U.S. Tariff Act, the Department of Commerce determines whether goods are being sold at less than fair value or if they're benefiting from subsidies provided by foreign governments. In Canada, lumber-producing provinces set so-called stumpage fees for timber harvested from Crown land, a system that U.S. producers — forced to pay market rates — consider an unfair subsidy. U.S. lumber producers consider Canadian stumpage fees, for harvesting on Crown land, an unfair government subsidy. (Michel Nogue/Radio-Canada) Indeed, the U.S. Lumber Coalition — which represents softwood lumber producers in that country — welcomed the planned spike in duties in a statement on Friday. "These unfair trade practices are designed by Canada to maintain an artificially inflated U.S. market share for Canadian products and force U.S. companies to curtail production, thereby killing U.S. jobs," said Andrew Miller, the chairman of the coalition, in the statement. Eby to meet with PM CBC News has reached out to Global Affairs Canada to find out if the federal government plans to take countermeasures against the planned hike in duties. In August 2024, when the duties were hiked from 8.05 per cent to 14.54 per cent, the federal government had indicated it would fight the tariffs at the U.S. Court of International Trade and at the World Trade said the B.C. government would work with the forest sector and the federal government to fight the duties "through all avenues available to us." "I am meeting with the Prime Minister on Monday ... and I plan on raising this issue with him directly," the premier said. "B.C. workers and their families depend on the jobs that these tariffs are targeting, and we hope to see the same Team Canada approach to protecting them, just like with the automotive and steel industry jobs in Ontario and Quebec." The United States has long been the single largest market for B.C. lumber exports, representing over half the market for the approximately $10-billion industry. But amid a series of challenges for the province's forestry industry — including a mountain pine beetle infestation that killed hundreds of thousands of trees — mills have been closing around the province in recent years, and major forestry companies are opening up new mills in the United States. In 2023, numbers from Statistics Canada showed B.C. had lost more than 40,000 forest-sector jobs since the early 1990s.
Yahoo
02-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
U.S. Lumber Coalition Applauds President Trump's Additional Measures to Investigate Unfair Trade Practices
WASHINGTON, March 2, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- President Trump has ordered an investigation under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to determine the "impact of foreign government subsidies and predatory trade practices." "We know that foreign governments such as Canadian federal and provincial governments subsidize the Canadian lumber industry to promote employment and disruptive excess Canadian lumber production that is then dumped into the U.S. market to the detriment of U.S. companies and workers," stated Andrew Miller, Chair/Owner of Stimson Lumber Company. "President Trump is absolutely correct in saying that we do not need any unfairly traded Canadian lumber imports," stated Miller, adding that "the combination of fully enforcing our antidumping and countervailing duty trade laws and this additional enforcement step against unfair trade taken by President Trump will accelerate addressing the harmful effects of foreign unfair trade practices in lumber. Thank you President Trump!" concluded Miller. U.S. lumber community voices on President Trump's trade law enforcement and the positive impacts on U.S. manufacturing: About the U.S. Lumber CoalitionThe U.S. Lumber Coalition is an alliance of large and small softwood lumber producers from around the country, joined by their employees and woodland owners, working to address Canada's unfair lumber trade practices. Our goal is to serve as the voice of the American lumber community and effectively address Canada's unfair softwood lumber trade practices. The Coalition supports the full enforcement of the U.S. trade laws to allow the U.S. industry to invest and grow to its natural size without being impaired by unfairly traded imports. Continued full enforcement of the U.S. trade laws will strengthen domestic supply lines by maximizing long-term domestic production and lumber availability produced by U.S. workers to build U.S. homes. For more information, please visit the Coalition's website at CONTACT: Zoltan van Heyningenzoltan@ | 202-805-9133 View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE The U.S. Lumber Coalition Sign in to access your portfolio
Associated Press
02-03-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
U.S. Lumber Coalition Applauds President Trump's Additional Measures to Investigate Unfair Trade Practices
WASHINGTON, March 2, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- President Trump has ordered an investigation under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to determine the 'impact of foreign government subsidies and predatory trade practices.' 'We know that foreign governments such as Canadian federal and provincial governments subsidize the Canadian lumber industry to promote employment and disruptive excess Canadian lumber production that is then dumped into the U.S. market to the detriment of U.S. companies and workers,' stated Andrew Miller, Chair/Owner of Stimson Lumber Company. 'President Trump is absolutely correct in saying that we do not need any unfairly traded Canadian lumber imports,' stated Miller, adding that 'the combination of fully enforcing our antidumping and countervailing duty trade laws and this additional enforcement step against unfair trade taken by President Trump will accelerate addressing the harmful effects of foreign unfair trade practices in lumber. Thank you President Trump!' concluded Miller. U.S. lumber community voices on President Trump's trade law enforcement and the positive impacts on U.S. manufacturing: About the U.S. Lumber Coalition The U.S. Lumber Coalition is an alliance of large and small softwood lumber producers from around the country, joined by their employees and woodland owners, working to address Canada's unfair lumber trade practices. Our goal is to serve as the voice of the American lumber community and effectively address Canada's unfair softwood lumber trade practices. The Coalition supports the full enforcement of the U.S. trade laws to allow the U.S. industry to invest and grow to its natural size without being impaired by unfairly traded imports. Continued full enforcement of the U.S. trade laws will strengthen domestic supply lines by maximizing long-term domestic production and lumber availability produced by U.S. workers to build U.S. homes. For more information, please visit the Coalition's website at
