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.

That's What You Get For Lovin' Me

It's an old Gordon Lightfoot song but it could well double as the anthem for Canada's softwood lumber capitulation, er treaty, with the United States.

To buy peace, we let the US government keep a big hunk of the illegal duties it levied on Canadian softwood imports, money that was then handed over to the US lumber industry to fund further legal attacks on us.

So the Harper/Emerson masterstroke agreement of 2006, the one where we supposedly bought seven years of peace, lasted one year before the Americans made their move.

That followed the procedures set out in the deal, arbitration first and then submission of the dispute to a court in London. Okay. The court came out, ruling in favour of BC and Alberta but finding that eastern producers were in violation of the terms.

Being a law-abiding country, Emerson wasted no time in saying Canada would accept the ruling which the treaty makes binding. So what do the Americans have to say? You got it, they won't say they'll accept the "binding" decision. Instead the US trade reps said they'll consult the "stakeholders," the American lumber companies that brought the attack funded by Canadian plunder.

And if they don't agree to their binding obligations? Well they're not quite so binding as we thought. Seems the US can bail out of the deal whenever they like. Would somebody remind me why the hell we're in Afghanistan anyway?

Big Wood, Big Mouths

No doubt about it. As far as the American lumber industry is concerned, Canada is their bitch. When Harpo's feckless trade min, David Emerson, folded Canada's hand and turned over to the US lumber companies a war chest in the hundreds of millions of dollars it was pretty obvious that we had just given our lunch money to the schoolyard bully. At that point it was only a matter of when, not if, they'd be back and, as expected, it wasn't long in coming.

The US Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports, an outfit that sees fairness as an entirely one-sided issue (theirs in case you didn't figure that out), is howling mad at Harpo's national community development trust fund.

Although the Harpies have earmarked the meagre, one billion dollar fund for job retraining and community infrastructure programmes, America's Big Wood is claiming that the funds will somehow be used to reduce liabilities of Canadian forestry companies in violation of the 2006 Canada-US softwood lumber capitulation pact.

Wouldn't it be great to see Harper actually "stand up for Canada" and tell Washington to get lost? Let's face it kids, we're their biggest supplier of energy and the only one they can take for granted. Maybe it's time to tweak their attitudes just a tad.