B.C.’s forest sector counted Prime Minister Mark Carney’s latest round of support for their industry that was unveiled Wednesday, including $500 million in new funding for loans, as helpful.
After eight years of this round of the Canada/U.S. softwood lumber dispute, though, and with the escalating tensions of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war, industry representatives highlighted that a negotiated resolution is the outcome their companies need.
“There’s nothing new to us (about negotiations), we knew this,” said Kim Haakstad, CEO of B.C.’s Council of Forest Industries about the wave of new support Carney unveiled in Ottawa. “We know they haven’t been getting the uptake they want on the U.S. side, but we really just appreciate that they continue to raise it and make it a priority with industries, like steel, like we saw today.”
In the meantime, Haakstad said the measures Carney unveiled Wednesday in Ottawa “reflect an important recognition of the role forestry and forest products play in the economic strength of Canada.”
At a news conference in Ottawa, Carney rolled out new support for steel, aluminum and softwood lumber producers — the industries hardest hit by Trump’s tariffs and the long-running lumber trade dispute.
He said the goal of his 2025 budget is to spur new investment to strengthen the domestic economy, but “to help get there, we must protect our workers and our industries who are most exposed to tariffs.”
Specifically for forestry, Carney said government will add $500 million to the softwood lumber guarantee program of loans and financing being administered by the Business Development Bank of Canada, devote $500 million from the loan facility Ottawa set up to help big businesses with liquidity and set up a single window, or “one-stop shop,” for all applications for federal support.
Lumber producers will also be included, along with steel producers, in rail freight subsidies to CN and CPKC railways that cover half the cost to ship their products interprovincially and in an expansion of the work-sharing program launched earlier this year to increase income-replacement ratios to 70 per cent from 55 per cent.
In Victoria, B.C. Forest Minister Ravi Parmar welcomed Carney’s commitment to create a forest sector transformation task force, among the measures.
“I’m really pleased to see the federal government has listened to British Columbia in particular on key proposals that we put forward,” Parmar said. “They’re making the necessary changes.
“We have to transform this sector,” Parmar said, adding that he will lobby for B.C. to receive its “fair share” of the funding.
Haakstad said the additional funding will be welcome, but the single-window for applications to all the forestry programs might be the most helpful commitment particularly for smaller companies not accustomed to working with federal aid programs.
“They’re not big on it,” Haakstad said. “Announcing these programs is Part 1, but actually getting them fully subscribed and maximizing the impact of them is the more important part.”
How effective the programs are, though, will depend on how quickly the support can reach companies on the ground.
However, extending loan programs and additional financing isn’t necessarily the assistance a lot of members in the Independent Wood Producers Association are looking for, according to its executive director Brian Menzies.
“They’re great if you could sell something to pay off your loan down the road,” Menzies said.
The difficulty for independent wood producers, which manufacture value-added products out of lumber they buy and don’t hold timber-cutting rights, is that they’ve been putting up bonds to cover softwood duties since 2017, Menzies said.
And they won’t necessarily be in a better position to pay back loans under the new programs.
“The best way out of this is some sort of trade agreement between Canada and the United States,” Menzies said. “Because our industry doesn’t want to be bailed out. We don’t want support. We actually just want to do our business.”
— With files from Alec Lazenby and Postmedia News
