The News-Review: Not All Duties Are Bad
September 4, 2018
|Originally Published in the News-Review by Steve Swanson
Here in Glendale, we know lumber. It’s powered towns like ours across the Pacific Northwest for over 165 years. Like many businesses in small towns and communities throughout Oregon and Washington, we at the Swanson Group are a family-owned business in the business of supporting families — we’ve had as many as three generations of families employed at one time at our Glendale sawmill.
A consistent presence for us — besides the Swanson clan at the helm of the mill — has been our struggle against a trade system in which the deck is stacked against us.
For more than five decades, the Canadian government has given handouts to its softwood lumber industry, allowing them to dump their products in the U.S. below market prices and tipping the scale in their favor. In fact, the U.S. government carried out a comprehensive investigation and found the imports were harming local lumber communities in the U.S. In response, the U.S. levied anti-dumping and countervailing duties on Canadian softwood lumber imports to offset Canada’s unfair trade advantage.
Read the full article here.