Tariffs creating difficulties for Woodland Pulp operations

Canada has removed counter‑tariffs from American lobster, to the relief of the industry in Maine and New Brunswick. However, life is getting more complicated for Woodland Pulp LLC, the largest single employer in Washington County with approximately 310 workers in Baileyville.

Canadians delivering round logs to the mill must now deal with customs brokers and cargo manifests alongside the 10% tariff announced by President Donald Trump last year, according to representatives of the forest products industry on both sides of the border. The days when trucks pulled up on the New Brunswick side just below the Grand Falls dam to dump loads of four‑foot pulpwood into the St. Croix River to float downstream to the Woodland mill are long gone.

"The tariffs are creating a lot of difficulty for trying to move fiber across the border. The suppliers have to use customs brokers in different forms, and we're trying to work with them to facilitate the movement of fiber, but it's certainly a headwind," says Scott Beal, spokesman for Woodland Pulp, adding, "I don't have any financial data to give you, but it certainly is not reasonable to think that it's been helpful or beneficial to us, and it's certainly made things more difficult for the harvesters on your [Canadian] side of the border, from what we know and understand."

He adds, "Suffice it to say, the tariffs are a headwind to our business and have created complexity for our valued Canadian suppliers by having to use custom brokers and new forms in order to comply. Woodland Pulp tries to assist them whenever and however we can. It's hard to see how the present‑day tariff and counter‑tariff response benefit anyone."

"It's an additional delay, it's an additional cost because you have to broker it," says Susannah Banks, executive director of the New Brunswick Federation of Woodlot Owners, adding, "You have to have manifests, which are now electronic, but somebody has to know how to fill out and get that electronic manifest to get you across the border. It's a delay and it's a cost."

The new requirement started about three months ago, according to Banks. "Yes, this is very new," she says.

Banks does not believe Canada is collecting tariffs on round logs from the United States but says such a tariff would have little effect on New Brunswick. "We import very little wood from Maine," she says, other than wood that J.D. Irving Ltd. and Acadian Timber bring from land they own in the state.

The tariff on logs from Canada prompted Woodland Pulp to suspend buying wood from Canada last fall, coinciding with a shutdown due to a weakening market. Production resumed in December, and the company began buying Canadian wood again.

Woodland Pulp draws about a third of its raw material from New Brunswick. Without this wood, the mill would have to go farther away in Maine to get raw material, increasing transportation costs. Cutting out Canadian competition might increase prices for Maine wood, but Banks doubts that landowners would come out ahead. "The more they spend on trucking, the less they [the mills] actually want to pay for their [woodlot owners'] product," she says.

Investors from the Calais/St. Stephen area built the original pulp mill on the banks of the St. Croix River in Baileyville in 1904. It has always drawn wood and employed people from both sides of the border.

The International Grand Investment Corp., based in Oregon, owns Woodland Pulp today. The mill in Baileyville produces St. Croix Hardwood, a type of pulp sold to papermakers around the world. An affiliated company, St. Croix Tissue, has consumed part of Woodland Pulp's production since 2016. Woodland Pulp acquired St. Croix Chipping in Baileyville in 2020.