Thank you, Madam Chair. Good morning, everybody.
My name is Jason Krips, and I'm president and CEO of the Alberta Forest Products Association.
First and foremost, I'd like to recognize that I am currently in Edmonton, on Treaty 6 territory. Our members operate in Treaty 6, 7 and 8 territories. I would like to acknowledge those who came before us, as well as the Métis nations of Alberta.
The Alberta Forest Products Association is a non-profit organization that has represented the sustainable forestry industry in Alberta since 1942. We represent companies that manufacture lumber, panel board, pulp, paper and secondary manufactured wood products in Alberta. Our members range from small, local businesses to large, publicly traded corporations. Alberta's forestry industry supports over 30,000 jobs throughout the province. These are well-paying jobs in a sustainable sector, creating products that are in demand around the world.
The AFPA member companies produce over three billion board feet of softwood lumber in Alberta each year, approximately 13% of Canadian production. Well over half of our members' annual production is exported to the United States. Those exports are subject to unfair anti-dumping and countervailing duties that the United States, in this latest iteration of the decades-long softwood lumber dispute, known as Lumber V, has been imposing since 2017.
When the United States Department of Commerce made its final dumping and subsidization determinations against Canadian softwood lumber in November 2017, the affected Canadian industry, along with the federal and provincial governments, requested binational panel reviews of those determinations, as was our right under chapter 19 of NAFTA.
Decisions by these binational panels are critical to Canada's interest in the softwood lumber dispute, because they have direct force of law in the United States. They can be Canada's most effective tool for challenging the unjustified duty orders against Canadian softwood lumber, and for recouping the billions of dollars in duty deposits, currently well over $7 billion, that our members and other Canadian exporters have been forced to pay under those orders.
Given the importance of these binational panels, one of the biggest sources of frustration in Lumber V has been the conduct by the United States that has prevented the panel process from working as it should. That conduct takes three forms.
First, the United States has been exceptionally slow in nominating its panellists.
Second, when the U.S. has nominated individuals to serve on panels, those nominees have been anything but independent and impartial. Many of them have been involved in the softwood lumber dispute while serving at the Department of Commerce, or have represented the U.S. industry. The United States has repeatedly renominated candidates who have been previously opposed by Canada because of material conflicts.
Third, the United States has refused to nominate, or appoint panellists concurrently, to hear appeals from the Department of Commerce decisions in what since the 2017 final determinations are now three subsequent administrative reviews. They are AR1 for the 2017-18 period, AR2 for 2019, and AR3 for 2020. Instead, the U.S. has insisted that each panel must be appointed successively.
Largely as a result of the United States conduct, the panel hearings in the anti-dumping appeal from the 2017 final determination took place only last week, more than five and a half years since the appeal was launched. Panels still have not been composed to hear the AR1 appeals that the Canadian parties launched in December 2020, nor the AR2 or AR3 panels launched in 2021 and 2022. That backlog will likely take longer when the Department of Commerce issues its AR4 final determination later this summer.
To put these delays into perspective, the rules of procedure for binational panels, under NAFTA and its successor, the CUSMA, contemplate that the entire process, from the request of the panel review through to the panel's decision, should take approximately 10 months. When the panel process has been conducted as intended, in prior softwood lumber disputes and even in other disputes under the CUSMA, these timelines, for the most part, have been respected.
Preserving that binational panel process was a key objective for Canada in the CUSMA negotiations, and one that Canada bargained hard to achieve. When it achieved that objective, the government rightly claimed it as an important success. Unfortunately, that success has been illusory. Due to the United States' conduct, the panel process is not operating as intended, and Canada is not receiving the benefits it bargained for. As a result, our members, like sawmills across the country, have no effective recourse for the billions of dollars in unfair duties that the United States has charged them, an amount that continues to grow daily.
We recognize that officials at Global Affairs Canada have made repeated efforts over the past several years to persuade their United States counterparts to approach the composition of binational panels in the Lumber V dispute in good faith. We are extremely grateful for those efforts, but sadly they have not succeeded.
It is clear that resolving this issue will require political engagement at the highest levels. It is our strong hope that the Prime Minister will undertake that engagement with President Biden to ensure that the binational panel process functions as the parties committed to, and that, going forward, our appeals from the U.S. panel lumber duty determinations can be heard expeditiously, by fair and impartial panellists.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.