The next Softwood Lumber Agreement won’t be happening this year, as Carl Grenier, lecturer at Canada's National School of Public Administration (ENAP) and Université Laval told participants at the Montreal Wood Convention, according to Wood Business.
As Grenier added, the new agreement will limit the trade options even more. Moreover, he thinks that the SLA signed in 2006 was a bad choice from Canada’s side.
"The direct costs of this agreement totalled $4.7 billion for the industry. Of that amount, one billion was paid to U.S. industry by the Canadian government,” he added.
As it happened back in 2014, the lumber prices were very low and free trade between Canada and the US was prevailed 23% of the time. As different forecasts consider this free trade, it should prevail at least half the time when lumber prices are quite high, Wood Business reported.
One glimmer of hope, however, is for Quebec, which finds itself in a better position than New Brunswick 30 years ago to ask to be excluded from this agreement.
"The new forest regime gives 25 per cent of wood available for auction and the price of 75 per cent of the remaining wood is determined by the price of wood sold at the auction," Grenier said.
Grenier blamed the political will, which would get Canada much better deals. For example, in the last 10 years, there has been very little interest in to preparing the ground for a new agreement. He also added that he thinks that the next agreement would be more restrictive especially because of the lack of political will.
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