Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to jump the queue, as it were, as my flight is in about 45 minutes, and I have to run.
Through you, thank you to the clerk and all members of the committee for the opportunity to join you here today.
My name is Jeff Bromley. I'd like to begin by acknowledging that my office is on the unceded territory of the Ktunaxa Nation, located in southeastern British Columbia.
I've spent 29 years in the forestry industry in the Kootenays, in southeastern B.C. I now serve as chair of the United Steelworkers Wood Council. The council is made up of 11 local unions across Canada, representing 14,000 forestry and manufacturing workers, with approximately 1,500 members in Quebec.
The United Steelworkers Union is the largest private sector union in North America, with 225,000 workers in nearly every economic sector in Canada, including 15,000 workers in the forestry industry.
To begin, I think we can all agree that when we're talking about protecting the forestry industry, we're talking about the Canadian economy, but we're also talking about the workers, their families and the communities they support, a very large majority of which are in rural Canada.
There's more, though, along with steel, aluminum and cement, wood products produced in Canada have some of the lowest carbon emissions in the world, and Canada's forest products are a net carbon sink.
As we look for ways to lower Canadian and global emissions, Canadian wood products need to be part of the equation. The Americans are already on it. The Biden administration is tying together infrastructure spending with fighting climate change and creating good union jobs. Canada should be a natural partner, but instead of becoming a bigger and bigger supplier of forestry products to the U.S., we're shipping them less and less. Competing nations out of Europe are earning larger and larger amounts of the U.S. softwood lumber market, because they aren't being hit with the huge tariffs that the U.S. puts on us.
Even though they have to ship their products across the ocean, other countries can get their products into the U.S. market for less, and they are.
For example, 10 years ago Russia exported less than 1,000 cubic metres of lumber to the U.S. By 2021, before Putin's latest invasion of Ukraine, that number jumped to over a million cubic metres a year.
Meanwhile, last year Canada had exported close to six million fewer cubic metres of lumber than we did just six years ago.
Let me put that into perspective. For every 850,000 cubic metres per year that we export or use, that equals roughly one sawmill operation. Approximately 160 workers make between $80,000 and $100,000 a year. Let me assure you that our members are not socking that money away into offshore-based bank accounts. Their money gets spent to support and grow their families, and it gets spent in their local communities.
Now, I'm not usually a defender of the employer. In fact, I'm heading into bargaining with the number one and number two largest forestry companies in the country this week. However, when markets for the softwood commodity are low, unfair duties have added an increasing percentage of cost of anywhere from 4% to 17% over the seven years of this latest U.S.-Canadian softwood lumber dispute.
The duties and the anti-dumping amounts have been set at various amounts since the expiry of the last deal in 2017, and the difference can mean the employer is staying above water or not, which means the difference between our members working or not.
I will say that when things are going well, what they are able to make gets put back into developing the Canadian industry, and the future of our industry is getting higher value from our softwood products in the form of CLT, or cross-laminated timbers, for example. It will take capital to add to the ability of these mills to produce high-value, carbon-neutral products for the future.
As for the U.S. tariff money, it goes to the American economy; it goes to the American industry, and it goes to paying American lawyers to keep defending the tariffs and jacking them up.
The U.S. softwood lumber lobby in Washington continues to say that our publicly owned Canadian forests are subsidized to our industry, but they aren't. Our industry builds the roads, decommissions the roads, plants three seedlings for every one tree harvested and, on average, pays 1.5 times the average wage and benefits of the U.S. industry.
It goes without saying that these tariffs are unfair and damaging. We know they contravene fair trade in almost all WTO decisions, but the U.S. government has missed key opportunities to scrap them. I hope that with the work of this committee, we do better next time.
With that, I thank you for your time. I look forward to your questions.