It’s been years since Carlos Zarate and others in Canada’s decorative plywood industry started telling the federal government about a growing problem in their business.
But they’ve been dumbfounded by their inability to convince Canadian authorities to crack down on the Chinese products, which have been subject to hefty duties in the U.S. since 2017. But the agency’s investigation didn’t go the way Zarate had hoped, and the association appealed in Federal Court about the decision of the president of the CBSA to drop the investigation.
“Even before the case, we’ve seen many Canadian plywood mills and veneer mills disappear throughout the years because they could not compete against the Chinese imports,” he said. The association and its members said in the complaint to the border agency in 2020 that there had been “injurious dumping and subsidizing” of products by Chinese producers.
At the same time, the Canadian International Trade Tribunal began an inquiry stemming from the domestic producers’ complaint to the CBSA.