Despite the possibility that American duties on Canadian lumber will increase as part of the escalating trade war between the two countries, Premier David Eby told a Prince George crowd Friday afternoon that U.S. demand for lumber isn’t going down.
Back in January, Eby addressed delegates at the 2025 BC Natural Resources Forum at the Prince George Conference and Civic Centre about his government was preparing for potential tariffs from the second Trump administration.
In the same room for the 2025 Council of Forest Industries convention on Friday, April 4, Eby was no longer talking about hypotheticals but instead the concrete actions his government is looking to take to protect this province’s forestry sector.
He said U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said that America is targeting three key Canadian business sectors: Automotive, pharmaceutical and timber.
“They have trade irritants they want to deal with on the agricultural side, but the people in this room are an explicit target of the Americans,” Eby said.
“Last month, we heard the department of commerce threaten to double tariffs — anti-dumping duties they call them, but they’re tariffs — on lumber out of British Columbia. We have obviously heard of the ludicrous and absurd national sector here in Canada, which will likely lead to additional tariffs.”
Despite Trump’s posturing about how the U.S. doesn’t need Canadian products, Eby said America needs Canadian timber, with one in 10 sticks of lumber used down south coming from BC.
The result is that building homes in the U.S. will be more expensive, Eby said.
“The message for our government, the federal government, for business, for all Canadians is we’ve got to work together and get through this until sanity prevails in the United States,” the premier said.
“And if it doesn’t, work together to diversify our markets internationally and across the country.”
The premier slammed Trump’s tariff announcement on countries from around the world earlier this week, saying the president wiped trillions off dollars of value off the stock market and tanked consumer confidence to its lowest levels since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eby said the province is working to address not only the threat of tariffs but challenges with available legal timber supply as well, saying that government policies, court decisions and federal endangered species legislation have had unintended consequences for the forestry industry.
Earlier this year, Eby announced that his government was fast-tracking 18 natural resource projects in response to the trade war.
It wasn’t included on that list, but Eby said he and Forests Minister Ravi Parmar are working to hit a target of having 45 million cubic metres of harvestable timber per year in BC.
After the release of this year’s provincial budget, COFI put out a media release expressing disappointment in a lack of forestry-specific supports and lack of detail in how the province was going to meet the 45 million cubic metre target set by the NDP as an election promise last year.
To help achieve this goal, Eby told the convention that his government has a team of deputy ministers working to speed up permitting, forest landscaping planning tables and prioritize Indigenous agreements to boost access to fiber.
He said the province is recruiting industry stakeholders to the board of the Forestry Innovation and Investment Organization for the first time and that Makenzie Leine from A&A Trading Ltd. in Vancouver was being hired to serve as a deputy minister for forestry with a background in the industry.
When Eby and Parmar spoke at the Natural Resources Forum in January, they announced that the Ministry of Forests was conducting a review of BC Timber Sales, which manages forest harvesting on more than 20 per cent of public land in the province.
Eby said on April 4 that BCTS is working to reduce fuel loads in high-risk areas to reduce fire risk, expand commercial thinning and link those activities with commercial activities.
A release issued through the provincial government added that through the review process, BCTS is also committee to remove health-damaged trees to improve recreational sites and ecosystem resilience, rehabilitate rangelands and strengthen its partnership with the BC Wildfire Service.
“This is going to lay the groundwork for changes that communities, workers, industry have been asking for from us for a long time,” Eby said.
“Some of these changes we’ve been reluctant to make for fear of kicking off retaliation or tariffs from the United States. So hey, here we are. In a way, the actions of the American will create the opportunity for us to revisit some of the ways we operate in order to ensure that we’re meeting the needs of the forest sector and the province.”
During a Prince George city council meeting back in March, Coun. Garth Frizzell noted that if Eby’s proposed legislation allowing the province to put tolls on truck traffic heading to and from Alaska through BC goes forward, Prince George could be hurt as one of the major stops along the way.
Asked by The Citizen how he would prevent such measures from hurting communities from Prince George more than the U.S., Eby said it’s not a tool his government wants to use but they didn’t ask for the current trade war.
“We’ve got friends and family in Alaska, a lot of people dependent on good relationships with Alaska,” Eby said.
“There’s an Alaskan congresswoman that voted with Democrats to condemn tariffs on Canada. This measure is to get the attention of those Republicans in Alaska, particularly, to remind them of how much we have in common and frankly, give them motivation to stand up to a president that openly threatens people that move against his agenda.”
Four Republican senators voted with Democrats on April 3 on a resolution opposing Trump’s tariffs on Canada, including Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski. The other Alaskan, Republican Senator Dan Sullivan, opposed the resolution.
Eby also highlighted legislation his government is proposing that would allow BC to recognize other provinces and territories’ rules when allowing products or services to be sold in this province to make it just as easy to sell to Ontario as it is to Washington state.
Whoever forms the next government after the upcoming April 28 federal election, Eby said he’d like to work with the new prime minister to work on attracting American professionals like teachers, experts and medical workers to BC and across Canada.
The premier said that Washington Governor Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, is planning a visit to BC.
Answering questions from COFI CEO Kim Haakstad after his address, Eby said that while previous prime minister Justin Trudeau had a dollar-for-dollar approach to implementing retaliatory tariffs, new Prime Minister Mark Carney has a more targeted response looking to minimize collateral damage.
He added that COFI and the Forest Products Association of Canada have submitted lists of products they’d like to be excluded from retaliatory action as the trade war escalate.
