Asa Johal and Terminal Forest Products by Jinder Oujla-Chalmers

Author:Jinder Oujla-Chalmers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Asa Johal, Terminal Forest Products, History, Businessmen, British Columbia, Biography, Sikh, Sikh Canadians, forest products industry
ISBN: 9781550178906
Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Published: 2019-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

In June 1985 the softwood lumber dispute boiled over again after US producers, who were now organized as the Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports, lobbied Washington for redress through the International Trade Commission (ITC). At the same time they filed a countervail petition for an import duty of 27 per cent on Canadian lumber; unfortunately, BC Premier Vander Zalm chose this moment to announce that stumpage rates in BC actually were too low, in essence agreeing with the US complaints. In June 1986 the ITC ruled that imports of Canadian lumber were damaging the American industry, and later that year Ottawa agreed to impose a 15 per cent tax on all softwood lumber destined for the US market. For Terminal Forest Products this agreement meant that, though the company bought all its logs at open market prices rather than logging them and paying stumpage, it would now, like all Canadian softwood exporters, be taxed on the lumber it exported to the US. In late 1987 the federal government reached agreements with BC and Quebec whereby they would charge higher stumpage fees in exchange for Ottawa cancelling the 15 per cent tax. And there the dispute seemed to have been resolved.

In spite of the softwood lumber dispute, a wildcat strike and the loss of the Japanese hemlock market, Terminal Forest Products still made progress in the 1980s. The company was turning out higher quality products than the competition as well as innovating with several new product introductions. “We were grading the lumber higher than most companies,” Avtar recalls, “and to a higher standard than government and Council of Forest Industries’s grading books mandated. We provided special grades to suit our customers’ needs and we cut the logs a certain way to get better-looking lumber. We gave them knots in their boards if they wanted them, and for others who didn’t want knots, we customized for them but always with a higher standard.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.