LOGS TO CHINA

 

Logs to China, Tariffs from Trump!

How B.C. Hollowed Out Its Own Forest Industry

When West Fraser announced the permanent closure of its 100 Mile House mill, the official story was simple: blame Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The Forests Minister said, from a trade mission in Tokyo, that curtailments and closures are happening “because of the actions of Donald Trump,” not because of provincial policy.

Tariffs are real. They hurt. But that neat narrative erases a big, uncomfortable part of the story:

    For more than 20 years, B.C. has been shipping millions of cubic metres of raw logs overseas – especially to China – instead of turning them into long-term jobs and value here at home.

Now, with mills closing and towns like 100 Mile House reeling, suddenly nobody in government seems eager to talk about that piece.

Let’s put it on the record.

The raw-log era: how big is it, really?

Raw log exports are not a rounding error. They’ve been a pillar of coastal forest policy for two decades.

• From 2002–2012, B.C. exported about 47 million cubic metres of raw logs – more than triple the 14.8 million m³ exported in the entire 1990s.
• Between 2013 and 2016, companies exported another 26 million m³, worth over $3 billion.
• In 2016 alone, just under 6.3 million m³ of raw logs left B.C. – roughly one out of every three trees cut on the Coast.

This isn’t just dusty history. The practice continues:

• In 2024, B.C. exported about 2.75 million m³ of raw logs, up 8.7% from 2023, even as mills closed citing a lack of fibre.
• According to analysis based on provincial permits, roughly 18.5% of the coastal log harvest in 2024 was approved for export.

If you’ve watched log ships load in Nanaimo, Duke Point, Crofton or Port Alberni and wondered, “Shouldn’t some of that be jobs here?” — you were asking the right question.

Follow the ships: China’s role

At the start of this century, most raw logs went to the U.S. and Japan.

• In 2002, roughly 50% of B.C.’s log exports went to the U.S., 44% to Japan, and less than 1% to China.

Then China’s construction boom took off.

By 2011:
• Over half of B.C.’s raw logs were going to China, with South Korea taking another big slice.
• Across the wider Pacific Northwest (B.C., Washington, Oregon), raw softwood log exports to China alone exceeded US$1 billion that year.

In other words, the business model became:

    Cut logs on the Coast → load them straight onto a ship → send them to Chinese mills to be turned into lumber, panels and furniture there.

Those are jobs, investments and expertise that could have been anchored in B.C. Instead, we shipped the opportunity offshore with the wood.

Why did governments allow it?

On paper, B.C.’s rules say timber from Crown land is supposed to be processed here unless it’s “surplus” to domestic needs. To export logs from Crown tenure, companies are supposed to:

1. Offer logs to local mills,
2. Show there’s no domestic buyer at the set price, and
3. Pay a “fee in lieu of manufacture” (an export tax) if they want to ship them out.

In practice, several forces pushed hard in the other direction:

1. Price differences
   Export markets often paid much more than domestic mills. In 2011, average coniferous logs on the Vancouver Log Market earned about $74/m³, while exports averaged $108/m³ – roughly 45% higher.

2. Policy changes that broke the mill–tenure link
   The 2003 Forestry Revitalization Act stripped away “appurtenancy” requirements that once tied cutting rights to local milling. Companies could close mills yet keep logging and increasingly sell unprocessed logs overseas.

3. Private timberlands on the Coast
   Large private holdings on southern Vancouver Island (the old E&N land grant) are not governed like normal Crown land. Companies such as TimberWest and Island Timberlands/Mosaic could export huge volumes with fewer constraints. In 2016, those two alone accounted for about 44% of the 8.1 million m³ companies intended to export.

4. Failure to retool when paper collapsed
   As old pulp and paper mills shut (Gold River, Elk Falls, etc.), domestic demand for certain logs and chips dropped. Instead of aggressively building new, higher-value wood manufacturing here, governments allowed more and more logs to “solve the problem” by leaving on a barge. At one point, Harmac’s pulp mill near Nanaimo had to chip raw logs directly because sawmill residual chips were no longer available – while ships were still loading whole logs nearby.

Bottom line: successive governments of different stripes made peace with a raw-log export economy, especially on the Coast. It brought in stumpage, fees and corporate revenue, but it hollowed out the long-term manufacturing base.

Meanwhile in the Interior: “no fibre” – and now tariffs

The 100 Mile House closure is an Interior story, not a coastal one – but the pattern rhymes.

Over the last decade:

• B.C.’s total annual harvest has fallen from about 71 million m³ in 2014 to 39 million m³ in 2023.
• In 2023, the actual harvest was roughly 40% below the allowable annual cut (AAC) – meaning millions of cubic metres that could legally be harvested simply weren’t, due to a mix of economics, fires, beetle, and policy restrictions.

So Interior mills are told “we’re out of economically viable timber” and close.

Coastal communities are told “we don’t have enough fibre for pulp and sawmills.”
Yet year after year, ships leave Nanaimo and Crofton loaded with whole logs.

Now add Trump to that mix.

Tariffs: the final shove for a weakened industry

Trump’s latest round of tariffs piled new lumber duties on top of existing anti-dumping and countervailing measures. For B.C. producers, the combined hit on softwood lumber going into the U.S. is now on the order of 40–45%.

At the same time, independent analysis shows:

• The U.S. still cannot meet its own softwood lumber needs without Canadian wood. Even if American mills pushed their capacity hard, there would still be a multi-billion-board-foot shortfall that only imports can fill.

So tariffs don’t stop Canadian wood crossing the border; they just raise the price and squeeze the margins.

Tariffs 101: who really pays?

Politicians like to pretend “the foreigners pay.” Reality:

• The U.S. importer writes the cheque to the U.S. Treasury.
• That cost gets split:
  – Forward into higher prices for U.S. builders and homeowners, and
  – Backward into lower net prices and lost volume for Canadian mills.

A simplified comparison:

Before tariffs
– Canadian mill nets: $1.00
– U.S. builder pays: $1.10

After tariffs
– Canadian mill might net: $0.92–0.95
– U.S. government takes: $0.15–0.20 in duty
– U.S. builder pays: $1.15+

The losers: Canadian workers and U.S. homebuyers.
The winners: the U.S. government and U.S. producers who get more market share and higher prices.

For a high-cost region like B.C., already weakened by fires, beetles, policy uncertainty and years of shipping raw logs instead of building strong mills, that extra hit is often the final straw.
That’s what happened in 100 Mile House.

Why you don’t hear “raw logs” in the talking points

You can probably see why no one in Victoria wants to connect the dots.

To talk honestly about raw logs and tariffs in the same breath, government would have to admit:

• We spent 20+ years exporting vast amounts of unprocessed timber, often to China, instead of directing that fibre into new mills and higher-value products here.
• We dismantled policies that tied cutting rights to local jobs, and let private coastal landowners profit richly by shipping logs offshore.
• We failed to build a robust, modern manufacturing base that could better ride out trade wars and price swings.
• Now, with tariffs rising and fibre supplies tightening, we are paying the price – in 100 Mile House, on Vancouver Island, and across B.C.

It’s much easier to shake a fist at Trump than to admit our own governments helped hollow out the industry long before he showed up.

Sidebar: Log Measurements 101

For Voice of Nanaimo readers, a quick cheat sheet so the numbers mean something:

Board foot (bf)
A board foot is a volume measure equal to a board 1 inch thick, 12 inches wide, 12 inches long (1" × 12" × 12"). That’s 144 cubic inches of wood.

Thousand board feet (MBF)
Sawmill output is often quoted in thousand board feet.
Example: a small mill might cut 100,000 board feet (100 MBF) a day.

Million board feet (MMBF)
Large mills or annual capacity are often quoted in millions of board feet.
West Fraser’s 100 Mile House mill produced about 160 million board feet of lumber a year before closure – enough dimension lumber to frame tens of thousands of homes.

Cubic metre (m³)
The metric measure used in most official B.C. stats and cut permits.
A rough rule of thumb:
1 m³ of sawlogs ≈ 400–450 board feet of lumber output, depending on log size and how efficiently it’s sawn.

So when you read that B.C. exported 6.3 million m³ of raw logs in a year, that’s on the order of 2.5–2.8 billion board feet of potential lumber – a staggering amount of wood bypassing local mills.

Cords
More common in firewood. A full “cord” is a neatly stacked pile of wood 4 feet high, 4 feet deep, 8 feet long – about 3.6 m³ of solid wood and air space together.

Once you start converting between these numbers, you realize just how much fibre has been leaving B.C. unprocessed – and how many mills and jobs that could have supported.

If we want a future where towns like 100 Mile House – and mill-dependent communities around Nanaimo – still have a reason for young families to stay, we can’t keep pretending this is all Trump’s fault.

We have to ask, loudly and clearly:

Who decided that shipping our logs, our jobs and our future overseas was acceptable in the first place – and what are we going to do differently now?