OTTAWA — Canada’s uneasy forestry truce with the United States is about to get a two-year extension that should keep the sniping at a low level into 2015.
Sources on both sides of the border confirm there are no major objections to extending the deal and that an announcement is expected in the new year.
But with irritants still occasionally popping up, at least one stakeholder — the U.S. lumber lobby — says it is opposed to any extension beyond two years.
The seven-year pact is expires in 2013.
The U.S. Lumber Coalition says it is in favour of the extension because the industry is too fragile for a return to the years where lawsuits were filed almost as often as trees were felled.
That is also the view of the Forest Products Association of Canada, which says the industry needs the certainty of the deal, even though it believes the agreement is far from perfect.
The U.S. coalition, which is pressing ahead with its latest complaint against British Columbia’s marketing practices, says the hope is that by 2015 the U.S. housing market will have recovered sufficiently that mills on both sides of the border can peacefully co-exist.
From Canada’s point of view, the 2006 treaty has coincided with one of the worst stretches of depressed conditions in recent times, largely due to the U.S. housing collapse that began in 2007.
Wood exports to the U.S. dropped from $15 billion in the first year of the agreement to as low as $5 billion in 2009, recovering to just $6 billion last year.