Jake Power

It was a scramble for Jake Power’s specialty sawmill to ramp up shipments across the U.S. border before the big hit from a more than doubling of softwood lumber duties took hold as of midnight Monday. “You can only do so much of that,” said Power, CEO of his family’s firm, Power Wood. “The customers are only willing to stock up so much. I would say our June and July were maybe 10, 20 per cent more than we would have expected without this.” …the U.S. confirmed it would implement [an] increase in punitive duties on Canadian lumber producers, pushing anti-dumping duties to an average 20 per cent. …[But] independent mills don’t hold rights to harvest the timber that the U.S. argue is being subsidized by the province’s stumpage system. So they wind up paying duties on the price of their finished products, not just the lumber that went into them, which Power said has added up.