With Canadian lumber producers facing crippling American duties and tariffs, Canadian sawmills that want to stay in business may have to develop markets outside the U.S. Since North America is the only major lumber market that still uses imperial measurements for lumber, this would require retooling logging and sawmill operations to metric. Some B.C. mills are already partway there. With Japan and China becoming saturated, Canadian lumber exporters will need to develop–or redevelop–markets beyond the Indo-Pacific. “We did this before,” said Rick Doman, chairman of Forest Innovation Investment (FII). In the 1990s and early 2000s, Canadian sawmills produced lumber for those markets, he said, but eventually lost them. “The North American market got so strong that we left those markets, and really the Nordic countries took over those markets,” Doman said. But the U.S. has since erected trade barriers in the form of duties and tariffs.