U.S. Tariffs Push Canadian Mill Town Toward Oblivion as Lumber Dispute Drags On

A small forestry town in southern Canada is edging toward oblivion as a decades-long tariff dispute with the United States drags on and the latest round of Trump tariffs deals a fresh blow to an already battered industry.

That latest blow has fallen on 100 Mile House, a district of roughly 2,000 people in south-central British Columbia, where the sawmill shut permanently in December 2025 — the third in the region to close in recent years, costing 165 workers their jobs.

The closure came two months after the Trump administration added a 10 percent tariff on imported timber, citing national security concerns, on top of the countervailing duties the United States has imposed on Canadian softwood for years.

Maureen Pinkney, the mayor of 100 Mile House, said the shutdown has taken a toll on a small community where mill workers are an integral part.

"That's a real hard hit to very small communities where those people are an intricate part. And we had one mill worker leave and so did his wife who was a nurse. In the shortages of health care workers, that's a double hit which we really feel that," she said.

For workers in 100 Mile House, the mill closure brought steady work to an end.

"It's a direct hit against mill workers here for sure. And all of us went from one day working steady here, and to the next day, we're done," said Brundage, a forestry worker in 100 Mile House.

The softwood lumber dispute is among the longest-running and most costly trade conflicts between Canada and the United States.

It began in 1982, when Canadian softwood lumber exports accounted for more than a quarter of U.S. consumption. U.S. lumber producers argued that Canadian provincial governments gave forestry companies access to public timber at below-market prices, amounting to an unfair subsidy.

Canada has rejected that argument, saying its exporters benefit from efficient industry practices and resource management rather than government support.

Terry Kading, an associate professor of political studies at Thompson Rivers University, said the dispute reflects a recurring U.S. effort to protect domestic industries from Canadian competition.

"Once a sector in the United States, like the lumber industry, feels that Canada is doing something with its lumber, that's dumping or using different methods and things like that. The U.S. ended up defending its lumber industry in the States against Canada," Kading said.

That pattern has persisted for more than four decades, through five rounds of U.S. trade investigations and three bilateral agreements, none of which has delivered a lasting settlement.

The United States has imposed countervailing and anti-dumping duties on Canadian softwood lumber for nearly 20 years in total. The prolonged dispute has added to the pressure on British Columbia's forestry industry.

According to the B.C. Forestry Council, more than 20 sawmills in the province have closed over the past three years, with tens of thousands of jobs lost.

The toll has drawn a response from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who in a video on Tuesday cast the softwood dispute as part of a wider pattern of U.S. trade pressure on Canada.

"Not the first time Americans have tried to use tariffs to break us," Carney said.

That pattern stretches back more than a century, to 1866, when the United States unilaterally cut trade ties with British North America, the predecessor of modern Canada.

Some Canadian scholars said the long history of trade disputes carries a lesson about trust in their southern neighbor.

"Canadians have certainly learned that they can trust the U.S. completely. Trust the U.S. to harm us or stab us in the back. So yes, we can trust that the U.S. to do that. I think that's a lesson for this generation of Canadians that we can't take the U.S. for granted. And we've gone from an era of implicit trust with the U.S. to needing to verify the trust," said Carlo Dade, the Director of International Policy and head of the New North America Initiative from the University of Calgary.