quote:

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B.C. Forests Minister Mike de Jong warned the bill could trigger a "full-scale crisis in the bilateral relationship between Canada and the U.S."

"If they move ahead with this, it will require retaliation from Canada," he said.

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Try to find any discussion in the unfortunate rags that pass as BC newspapers (Sun and Province). Not a bit.

No politician in BC has addressed this issue in public.

I agree completely with tacking an export fee on top of all lumber products going into the US.
It should be substantial, say 100%.

The US has been charging a 30% fee, and this hasn't slowed exports one bit.

If I was king of BC, there'd be a 100% export fee on lumber tomorrow.

The states is a big goddamn bully and I for one am very tired of it.

The softwood tariff is a national issue in Canada, but a local issue in various States. We need to make it a national issue in the US and the way to do that is to use the same tactics against the Americans. My suggestion is to put a tariff (say 29% like softwood) on all American cultural products: movies, tv shows, magazines, newspapers. We can certainly claim that they dump their cultural products on us and do whatever they can to destroy Canadian cultural products. I also suggest that we put tariffs on those food products, like lettuce and wine, which they deliberately underprice for the Canadian market. Also, we should ban American beef until they get their mad-cow problem under control, which should take at least as long as it takes for them to open the border to Canadian beef. By doing this we would get their attention. When they complain, we just point to what they are doing to us.

This is exactly what we should expect, especially from the Shrub and his clique of corporate puppets: blatant corporate welfare, using money they unfairly sucked out of Canada to further line the pockets of big US lumber interests, many of which own logging and milling operations in Canada as well (who no doubt will be going once again to our governments with their hand out).

Folks should keep in mind, however, that although the NAFTA trade board ruled against the US, it is now in the appeal stage to the trade umpire, who is basically a US judge. It is at this stage that the US has yet to lose a trade battle--both with Canada and Mexico.

The senator is obviously quite confident the US government will win again. Keep in mind that while the tribunal said the US government violated the spirit of NAFTA; it did not site any specific sections of the deal that were actually broken.

Add to this, the WTO ruling on the matter have been much more harsh on Canada, despite also not being happy with the US position. NAFTA gives the US government a lot more flexibility than to Canada or Mexico, and the WTO is clearly very pro-US big business.