(Washington) Canada urges the United States to make a good faith effort to negotiate an end to the protracted bilateral softwood lumber dispute.
International Trade Minister Mary Ng made the remarks after a new review by the U.S. Department of Commerce upheld anti-dumping and countervailing duties on softwood lumber imports from Canada.
Ms. Ng says these tariffs, while slightly lower, are still an unfair, baseless and punitive measure that hurts the economy on both sides of the border.
She argues that a negotiated settlement is the only way for the two countries to fully resolve the decades-old dispute.
Such a deal is unlikely: the United States has a fundamental problem with a regulatory system in Canada that it says disadvantages American producers.
US Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the United States would be willing to negotiate, but only if Canada scrapped its provincial stumpage system.
“It is in the interest of both our countries to negotiate an immediate solution to this long-standing trade dispute,” Ms. Ng said in a written statement. Canada is disappointed that the United States is not meaningfully engaging in discussions on a return to predictable cross-border trade in softwood lumber. »
The Commerce Department set a combined rate for “all other businesses” of 7.99%, slightly lower than the level of 8.59% established after the last administrative review.
Ottawa, meanwhile, will continue the fight through the dispute resolution tools of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), the World Trade Organization and US courts, Ng said.
“The only equitable outcome would be for the United States to stop enforcing these baseless rights,” she argued.
In Canada, timber-producing provinces set so-called stumpage fees for timber harvested from Crown land — a system that US producers, forced to pay market rates, say amounts to an unfair subsidy.
Federal officials in Ottawa have said Canada would never agree to implement such a fundamental change in the management of a key Crown resource before the two sides have even met.
