Another Canadian Lumber Shakedown

U.S. lumber producers are starting another shakedown of the B.C. lumber industry.

If most people in B.C. are still lounging in their easy chairs being entertained by TV coverage of the crazy electioneering going on down South in the U.S., it’s no longer a laughing matter.

American Republicans, driven by the right-wingnuts in the Tea Party, are waging all out war on the Obama-ite Democrats to take back a Congress majority in coming mid-term elections. As a result we are treated to Saturday-Night-Live style loonies like the woman who admitted to dabbling in witchcraft turning up as Republican candidates. Others have played on every America-first conspiracy theory existent, including that the entire world is bent on undermining the hallowed American Way Of Life.

Most of us recognize that the U.S. can be one wacky country sometimes, so mostly view these shenanigans with amusement.

But now, it’s starting to hit home.

I’m speaking, of course, of the American lumber lobby’s efforts to reopen the Softwood Lumber Agreement because of B.C.’s devastating pine beetle infestation, which has essentially destroyed the interior forest industry.
 
B.C. has no choice but to cut down great tracts of beetle-killed trees before they rot in the ground. It can’t just store the millions of board feet in some barn somewhere, so is putting them  into the worldwide market at prices that are generally lower than for typical lumber.
 
This, says the Coalition For Fair Lumber Imports, a lobby group for the U.S. lumber industry, amounts to a subsidy on lumber that is then exported to the U.S. because Canadian forests are “publicly owned” (as opposed to the U.S., where they’re owned by lumber companies).
 
Never mind that lumber companies in B.C. have to pay a pretty heavy price to the government for those trees. Those are all the right trigger words to America-firsters, who hear the term “publicly owned” as a euphemism for Communism.
 
U.S. trade officials have no choice but to hear the complaint and so have “requested” new talks with Canadian trade office under the Agreement.
 

They’re back for another payoff

Most of us in B.C. remember the devastation caused by the last lumber war that came under the Republican regime of George W. Bush. Goaded by America-first thinking, authorities threw out all their usual pretentious talk about holy free markets and engaged in some good old fashioned protectionism. Because they’re so big, they were able to force Canada into agreeing to impose what amounted to a tax on U.S. bound lumber.
 
It worked so well, they have decided to try it again.
 
Yes, we’ll fight them on this, and bureaucrats will talk it to death for a while. And then the results will likely be the same – we’ll give in. Taxes will be imposed, lumber prices will rise until they’re uneconomic, and thousands upon thousands of dead trees will rot in the ground, posing fire threats and belching CO2 into the world’s atmosphere for half a century.  
 
In any shakedown situation, the perpetrators don’t just go away once you pay them off. The next time they need some easy money, or some kind of emotional satisfaction, they come around again, threatening to hurt you unless you pay up some more.   
 
They have to be stopped. It might hurt, but you have no choice but to fight them or stall them until they find easier pickings somewhere else.
 
For years, the U.S. lumber lobby has identified us as a prime patsy for this kind of shakedown. Maybe it’s time we stopped being one.