Flights of the phoenix: explaining the durability of the Canada-U.S. softwood lumber dispute.
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Flights of the phoenix: explaining the durability of the Canada-U.S. softwood lumber dispute.
Benjamin Cashore, an expert on forest resource policy in Canada and the United States, is currently a post-doctoral fellow in the forest economics and policy analysis research unit at the University of British Columbia. He holds advanced degrees in political science from Carleton University (1986, 1988) and the University of Toronto (1997), as well as a certificate in French Studies at l'Universite d'Aix-Marseille III (1989). During the 1996-1997 academic year he conducted research under a Fulbright fellow-ship at Harvard University on the Canada-U.S. softwood lumber dispute.
* A list of acronyms used in this article is provided on page 37. I. INTRODUCTION For the last fifteen years Canada and the United States have been engaged in a dispute concerning billions of dollars of Canadian softwood lumber exports to the U.S. market. (1) As the largest and longest-lasting trade conflict between the two countries, the dispute has consumed vast amounts of time and money spent by industry and government officials on both sides of the border. It has also attracted the attention of an array of scholars in several disciplines. Despite this expenditure of human, financial, and intellectual capital, a long-term resolution has eluded policy makers. Even the latest truce signed in April, 1996, has a maximum life of only five years, after which discord is certain to continue. This essay explores the causes of the dispute, accounts for its longevity, and examines options for a long-term solution. To accomplish these tasks, two factors must be given more attention than the literature has afforded them to date: 1) the reciprocal and paradoxical relationship between the evolution of U.S. liberal trade policy and the increase in administered protection through "fair trade" laws and 2) the influence of environmental forest policy and politics in Canada and the U.S. To date, legal scholars have emphasized the complex technical arguments and adjudication of this dispute while downplaying the role of congressional lobbying. Conversely, political scientists have given a traditional, interest-based "Olsonian" account regarding the ability of well-organized and geographically concentrated companies to lobby Congress more effectively than dispersed consumer-based interests, (2) often downplaying the role of institutions as independent variables. Few analyses of the softwood lumber dispute have drawn on recent theories of U.S. trade policy that find both domestic and foreign policy centered explanations incomplete. This literature asserts that U.S. trade law after 1934 has "locked in" both protectionist (fair trade) (3) and liberal (free trade) dynamics, leading to an institutional setting that can be seen as an explanatory variable. (4) Goldstein and Nelson both argue that liberal ideas generally dominate and are expressed through the executive branch, while congressionally-focused protectionist interests are sent to administrative agencies for redress, minimizing protectionist pressures. (5) These dynamics encourage Congress to bargain with the executive branch to protect specific industries while giving overall authority to the presidency to negotiate liberal trading agreements. (6) This account of U.S. trade policy helps explain why congressionally-focused protectionist interests have been circumvented to a greater degree than an interest-based account would predict, and why an overall liberal trading regime continues as a foreign policy objective despite the decline of U.S. dominance in world trade since the early 1970s. (7) A study of the softwood lumber dispute is aided by such an institutional approach because it helps to explain why 1) throughout the history softwood lumber conflict, the U.S. executive branch has repeatedly accepted negotiated deals in lieu of countervail tariffs, 2) Canada and the U.S. entered into a free trade deal during this dispute, something interest-based accounts predicted would not happen, (8) and why 3) the nature of congressional influence on this dispute was altered in the early 1990s, rendering lobbying activity that was more explicitly tied to the softwood issue. Bringing an environmental forestry analysis to the trade dispute complements the institutional analysis and helps account for the decline of fiber supply from U.S. national forests, causing U.S. lumber companies to look north with envy at what they perceived to be less regulated Canadian competitors. It also explains why British Columbia officials at various times were able to use the countervail dispute as a way to justify stumpage rate increases and broad environmental forestry policy change, (9) as well as to account for the unusual coalition-building between U.S. lumber companies and North American environmental groups. Based on these insights, the paper puts forward two central arguments. First, the cause of the Canada-U.S. softwood lumber dispute is about much more than the different ways each country charges for th...See the full content of this document
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