Friday, January 21, 2011

Enormous Softwood Victory! No, Not Really.

Yippee!  Okay, we lost - BUT not as badly as we could have lost.

Canada has been ordered to impose an additional $60-million in special export levies on softwood producers in Quebec and Ontario.   Trademin van Loan says it could have been oh so much worse.   The Yanks were after $2-billion in extra tariffs.

But the surly Gringos aren't done with us yet, not hardly.   They're after half a billion bucks claiming that British Columbia is flogging lumber at rock bottom prices in the province's interior.   The Americans haven't figured out all that cheap lumber is the result of huge tracts of trees killed by mountain pine beetle infestations.

A Toronto trade lawyer is quoted by CTV as saying, "This is the cost of the deal we reached with the United States."  He's referring, of course, to the deal the Harper government made with the US.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Possibly an unknown and unidentified element in the story is we of the Secwepmc have been lobbying US lumber corporations to also include our argument in their case, mainly Canadian lumber companies taking wood from Crown land without consultation or compensation is also a hidden tax break.
I was floored when I learned of my people's beginning to involve themselves in this dispute. I don't know if we succeeded or not. Whether these US lumber companies send any of this money back north to us isn't yet resolved but these companies have committed to doing so if ruled to do so by their courts.

The Mound of Sound said...

Hi Troy. I wouldn't count on seeing Dime One from the US lumber companies That's not the way they roll.

Anonymous said...

It's about time we began building all buildings from stone and morter. We are killing our environment by using wood anyway. Trees produce 40% of our oxegyn.