The U.S. will impose further punitive tariffs on imports of softwood lumber from Canada, escalating a longstanding trade dispute that’s already led to higher timber prices.
Preliminary anti-dumping duties of as much as 7.7 percent will be levied on Canadian producers, the U.S. Department of Commerce said Monday in a statement. The move follows the government’s decision in April to slap countervailing tariffs of up to 24.1 percent on shipments from Canadian companies including West Fraser Timber Co. and Canfor Corp.
Until Canada and the U.S. reach a negotiated solution on softwood lumber, the nation will continue to “vigorously apply” the anti-dumping and countervailing duties to “stand up for American companies and their workers,” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said in a statement.
The trade spat, which has been going on intermittently for decades, was reignited in November when the U.S. lumber industry filed a petition asking for duties. The group alleges Canadian wood is heavily subsidized and imports are harming U.S. mills and workers. Since then, trade between the two countries has become an increasingly fraught issue, with President Donald Trump seeking to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The tariffs turned out to be less severe than some analysts had predicted. The U.S. Department of Commerce in a preliminary determination Monday said it has calculated that Canfor is selling product in the U.S. at 7.72 percent less than fair value, Resolute FP Canada at 4.59 percent, Tolko Industries at 7.53 percent and West Fraser at 6.76 percent. It set a preliminary dumping rate of 6.87 percent for all other producers in Canada.
Canada is the world’s largest softwood lumber exporter and the U.S. is its biggest market. Lumber futures in Chicago have jumped this year amid concerns that the trade battle will disrupt supplies.
While the additional duties are on the “lower end of the range” the industry was expecting, no tariffs are warranted, said Susan Yurkovich, the president of British Columbia’s BC Lumber Trade Council. Protectionist duties hurt Canadian companies and communities and also hurt U.S. consumers who choose to build, buy or renovate a new home, she said.
“We find it incredibly frustrating the U.S. industry continues to use litigation as a means to enhance their position and benefit from price volatility that their trade actions create,” Ms. Yurkovich said on a conference call with reporters.
The U.S. Commerce Department made a preliminary ruling earlier on Monday that the Atlantic provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia will be excluded from the punitive tariffs. A final decision is expected by late summer.
Jailed Nobel laureate
The United States on Tuesday joined calls for the immediate release of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, urging China to set him free so he may receive the medical treatment of his choosing for what is believed to be late-stage liver cancer.
Some worry it’s already too late. In a tearful video message, his wife, Liu Xia, suggested that treatment was either no longer possible, or simply not on offer. “Cannot perform surgery, cannot perform radiotherapy, cannot perform chemotherapy,” she said in the tearful, 10-second clip, which was posted by a friend. She did not elaborate.
With U.S. officials calling for answers, questions about Beijing’s handling of the case could affect U.S.-China ties under Mr. Trump.
Mr. Liu, 61, is a renowned writer and activist who participated in the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square and in 2010 became China’s first Nobel Peace Prize winner. He was arrested in 2008 after joining with other Chinese scholars and activist to call for greater freedoms and democratic reforms and was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
On Monday, local authorities confirmed reports that Mr. Liu was taken from his cell in northeast China to a local hospital for treatment for late-stage liver cancer. They did not provide specific information on his condition, but noted that eight cancer specialists are developing a treatment program.
“We call on the Chinese authorities to not only release Mr. Liu but to allow his wife, Liu Xia, out of house arrest,” said Mary Beth Polley, a spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy in Beijing.
Beijing must provide the couple “with the protections and freedoms, such as freedom of movement and access to medical of their choosing, to which they are entitled under the Chinese constitution, legal system and international commitments,” she said.
The White House itself has yet to comment.
Persian Gulf rivals
Players on all sides of the Persian Gulf diplomatic crisis were in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, making their cases to a divided administration that has been unable to stop the turmoil in the strategic region.
Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani’s meeting with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson came just days after his government dismissed a list of demands from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt as an illegal attempt to limit Qatar’s sovereignty and control its foreign policy.
As Mr. al-Thani and Mr. Tillerson conferred behind closed doors at the State Department, Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told reporters at his country’s embassy here that the demands were nonnegotiable.
“We’ve made our point. We’ve taken our positions” and Qatar knows “what they have to do,” said Mr. Jubeir, whose government has led the others in breaking relations with Qatar and limiting the isolated Persian Gulf peninsula’s air, land and sea access lanes.
Later in the day, Mr. Tillerson met with Kuwaiti Minister of State Mohammad Abdullah al-Sabah. Kuwait is trying to mediate the dispute between the fellow members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC, a loose confederation of six gulf states.
N. Korea on agenda
When South Korea’s new president comes to the United States this week for his first meeting with Mr. Trump, there will be no cozy dinners at Mar-a-Lago or rounds of golf in the Florida sunshine.
Instead, Moon Jae-in will be going to the White House for what is shaping up to be a challenging summit, with the leaders taking sharply different approaches to dealing with North Korea and a continuing disagreement over an American antimissile system deployed to South Korea.
“The summit should really be about drawing the big picture, but instead they will be focusing on areas of potential friction,” said James Kim, a specialist in U.S.-South Korea relations at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. “A lot will hinge on how the two leaders get along and the chemistry between them.”
Mr. Moon, a liberal who was elected president in a landslide in May following the impeachment of conservative Park Geun-hye amid a bribery scandal, has been doing his best to appear conciliatory in the lead-up to the summit.
China reprimanded for trafficking
Ivanka Trump led U.S. condemnation Tuesday of China and several other countries for failing to fight the scourge of international human trafficking, the 21st-century version of slavery, marking a shift for a White House sometimes accused of indifference to human rights.
In the State Department’s annual report on a problem said to enslave 20 million people worldwide, China was downgraded to the third and worst category of offenders.
Mr. Tillerson told reporters that Chinese companies use tens of thousands of North Koreans who are forced into labor and rarely paid. Their salaries instead go to the North Korean government, he said.
It marks the first time the Trump administration has publicly rebuked China’s human rights record. Except for criticism of Cuba, it is a rare instance when the administration has highlighted a global human rights abuse at all.
Russia-Iran sanctions measure
As congressional negotiators attempt to clear a key technical hurdle preventing a popular Russia and Iran sanctions bill from final passage, some lawmakers are expressing new concerns over the breadth of energy sanctions in the legislation.
Oil industry executives and some foreign diplomats are prodding them to water down the measure, approved in the Senate earlier this month on a 97 to 2 vote.
The bill would codify and step up existing sanctions on Russia’s energy, banking and defense sectors, while adding new restrictions on intelligence, metals, mining and railways industries as punishment for Moscow’s aggressive actions in Ukraine and Syria and alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections.
Aides in both parties describe behind-the-scenes worries over a change to a 2014 prohibition against U.S. companies participating in oil development ventures on Russian territory. The bill broadens that to restrict participation in any potential oil production project, anywhere, in which a Russian energy company is involved.
Manafort’s Foreign Agent filing
Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, received $17.1 million for his work with a Ukrainian political party, according to a registration document he filed with the U.S. government.
Mr. Manafort registered Tuesday with the U.S. Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires people to disclose any political or quasi-political work they do for foreign entities. Mr. Manafort’s filing covered his work on behalf of Ukraine’s pro-Russian Party of Regions between 2012 and 2013.
A Justice Department spokesman confirmed in an email that the department received the filing but provided no further details.
Mr. Manafort served as Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman from March to August of 2016, but he was forced to resign as he came under increasing scrutiny for his past work consulting for Kremlin-backed former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. His registration comes as a number of Mr. Trump’s associates are under scrutiny by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.
First Published: June 28, 2017, 4:23 a.m.