Article content

It’s a long-standing call of unions and industrial planners in Canada that the key to future prosperity is to export fewer natural resources by keeping them in Canada for processing and then shipping exports with more “value added.”

Forestry products are a regular target for this vision, where government fiat would displace market forces in determining our exports.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Opinion: More 'value-added' exports for forestry products hardly possible or desirable Back to video

However, the argument literally doesn’t even apply well to the forest-products industry. Already, most of the $41.3 billion of exports of forestry products take place after some or extensive processing. In 2016, exports of unprocessed logs totalled only $800 million, or less than two per cent, of all forestry-product exports (and not substantially more than the $400 million of log imports into Canada last year).

So a ban on such exports would generate minimal benefits, dictating to an industry to do what it has already been driven to by market forces.