The president of the Canadian Hardwood Plywood and Veneer Association says companies that make kitchen cabinets, table tops, and other decorative plywood products are suffering as they try to compete with cheap imports flooding the market.
Carlos Zarate says his industry needs Canada to impose duties on products imported from China, which he says are dumped onto the Canadian market at prices domestic producers can't hope to match or beat.
Zarate says unfair competition from subsidized and illegally harvested wood products from China are partly to blame for the industry's decline.
He claims Canadian plywood firms want duties on Chinese products like those in the United States, which were imposed back in 2017 based on nearly identical complaints from American producers about dumped and subsidized imports from China.