Canadians win softwood lumber dispute with US

By Barry Ellsworth

TRENTON, Canada (AA) – Canadian officials announced Thursday that they have won the dispute over U.S. duties placed on imports of softwood lumber.

Canada had filed a complaint about the duties under Chapter 19 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the mechanism that decides disputes and is binding. The complaint was registered after U.S. President Donald Trump in 2017 announced tariffs up to 24% on Canadian lumber.

“Canada welcomes the unanimous decision NAFTA Chapter 19 binational panel decision that there were insufficient grounds for the U.S. International Trade Commission to determine that Canadian softwood lumber products had materially injured the U.S. softwood industry,” Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said in a statement.

The American companies had argued that Canada allowed the lumber industry to harvest timber on government land tracts. The Americans said that was in effect a subsidy, and urged tariffs on the imported softwood lumber. The latter is wood such as pine, cedar and spruce used in residential construction.

The tariff dispute over the lumber dates to 1982 and has seesawed back and forth with various agreements, finally leading up to Thursday’s decision.

“This decision supports what Canada has been saying all along: U.S. duties on Canadian softwood lumber are unfair and unwarranted,” Freeland said. “The panel’s decision is an important step in the right direction in having these duties on Canadian imports removed and the sums collected (as tariffs) reimbursed.”

While there has been no official U.S. response to the ruling, Canadian lumber companies were celebrating the victory.

In a release, the British Columbia Lumber Trade Council applauded the decision.

British Columbia exported more than CAN$4 billion ($3 billion) in softwood lumber to the United States in 2017.

About 210,000 Canadians worked in the forest industry in 2017.