Hirsilinna hirsitalot ja hirsimökit

U.S. has been imposing punitive tariffs on Canadian lumber shipments. This artificially increases the price of Canadian lumber and U.S. consumers are not able to benefit from free trade.

This situation shows also in log home industry. Log homes tend to use more wood (I’m not counting the logs here) on interior decoration than other types of housing. Therefore, among house owners, log home owners carry lion’s share of skewed market price.

Why is it that lumber industry is able to arm-wrestle with much bigger interest groups? Perhaps nobody cares, well Canadian wood producers do because it costs lot of money for them. Wood users in U.S. are much wider group and during the recent housing bubble, raw material prices sink in easily.