VICTORIA — Premier David Eby cautioned last week that B.C. should not make too much of the appearance that the country “dodged a bullet” in the latest round of tariff fire from the U.S.

Yes, President Donald Trump had mostly gone scattershot against other nations large and small.

But “frankly you’d get whiplash if you followed the president’s every announcement,” Eby told reporters. “Two hours from now the president is going to put up another tweet and undo any sense of security that we might have.”

Besides, B.C. was already facing great damage because of earlier actions by the U.S.

“The president has committed to targeting our softwood lumber industry even more than the Americans already have with their unfair duties,” said Eby. “The president himself has said we don’t need to buy a single stick of lumber from Canada.

“He’s launched a ludicrous national security investigation into our timber practices here in order to impose additional tariffs under his emergency national security authority without going to Congress.”

That was Thursday.

Eby’s fears were borne out Friday, when the U.S. Commerce department announced a plan to more than double the duty against Canadian softwood.

Duties, levied at 14.4 per cent under the “friendly” administration of President Joe Biden, would be going to 34.45 per cent. In some cases, the levy on the B.C. product might exceed 50 per cent.

Eby took B.C.’s case to the airwaves on Trump-friendly Fox news on the weekend. Far from accepting that the U.S. needs “not a stick,” of Canadian lumber, the premier pointed out that this country supplies “one out of every 10 sticks” of the high-quality wood used to build American homes.

“We provide what you need, what you can’t get from other places,” said Eby, arguing that the tariffs will raise the cost of homebuilding supplies by 50 per cent in the U.S.

But apparently the Americans are taking steps to replace at least some of the wood supplied from Canada.

“Trump administration orders half of national forests open for logging,” was the headline Saturday in the Washington Post.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, a Trump appointee, lifted federal regulations to free up the “abundance of timber resources that are more than adequate to meet our domestic production needs.”

While the Americans readied themselves to ride out the tariff war, the B.C. premier met with Prime Minister Mark Carney in Victoria Monday to talk about responses to the softwood threat.

“It is important for the prime minister to understand the unique impacts of the president’s actions on British Columbia,” Eby told reporters, anticipating his talking points for the meeting.

“The risk always with prime ministers and with federal parties is to get trapped in Ontario,” said the Kitchener-born premier.

“They’re in Ontario all the time. They’re in Ottawa. They’re beside Quebec, literally just over a bridge, and they forget about the West. And so, my message to the prime minister will be that you have to be on top of issues in Western Canada and in B.C. and your response, whether to support workers or industries or whatever it is, needs to include B.C.”

Carney picked up the theme heading into the meeting on Monday.

“It starts with workers,” he told reporters, then touted the federal plan to expanding housing construction using Canadian building supplies.

Eby, for his part, told the legislature that Forests Ministry staff are “working on a proposal to defer stumpage for the forest sector, to give them some relief.”

The tariff threat likely means a setback for the ambitious goal that Eby set for the new forests minister, Ravi Parmar. He directed Parmar to “work toward…a harvest of 45 million cubic metres per year” from provincial forests.

The increase would be 50 per cent greater than last year’s 30 million cubic metres harvest, but still well short of the almost 60 million harvested the year the New Democrats took office.

Eby reiterated the goal in speaking to the Council of Forest Industries convention in Prince George Friday. COFI put out a report linking the declining harvest levels to slumping investment, growth, employment and productivity in the forest sector.

Though the industry welcomed the premier’s target for increasing the harvest, it remains privately skeptical that the NDP can make the necessary changes in regulation and permitting to bring about the increase.

The Finance Ministry appears to have its doubts about the 45 million cubic metre target as well. This year’s provincial budget and fiscal plan forecasts a status quo timber harvest of 30 million for this year and each of the next two.

“The outlook for forest revenues is lower than in recent years, incorporating lower harvest volumes,” said the plan. “The impact of the mountain pine beetle infestation and forest fires have reduced the supply of timber. Government is also protecting more of the oldest and rarest forests through the old growth deferral strategy.”

Not mentioned were other factors that have made B.C. the highest cost forestry jurisdiction in North America. Throw in the Trump tariffs and B.C.’s forest dependent communities are in for a dark and dismal year.

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