Most forests in Canada are provincially-owned, while in the U.S. they’re privately-owned. The U.S. has alleged that that allows Canadian producers to sell their lumber at a lower price, undercutting American producers in the process. The Americans say that amounts to a subsidy, a claim Canada has successfully fought at the World Trade Organization.
While we’ve been able to secure trade peace over lumber for periods of up to eight or 10 years, softwood lumber has largely remained a “managed trade” issue. The last SLA ended in October of 2015 and negotiations toward a new agreement did not produce a successful outcome. In November of 2016, the U.S. launched a countervailing duty and anti-dumping investigation against Canadian imports On April 24, 2017; the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a preliminary determination on subsidy and assessed preliminary countervailing duty rates of around 20%.
While most of Saskatchewan’s wood product exports to the U.S. are in Oriented Strand Board ($276 million in 2023) and not part of the SLA, softwood lumber is a significant business component of some of our lumber mills in Saskatchewan. In 2023, dimensional lumber shipped to the U.S. amounted to $102 million.