Western Forest Products is Building the Future Forestry Industry in BC.

A Douglas Fir glulam beam, forty feet long, holding up the roof of a mass timber building somewhere in North America. The tree it came from grew on the BC coast. It was felled on the BC coast. It was kiln dried on the BC coast before it crossed the border into Washington State, where WFP's glulam facilities glued it, shaped it, and sold it as a finished engineered beam.

Western Forest Products | Mass Timber is not running away. They are not abandoning their BC mills, employees, or partners. This is not Canfor, which permanently closed its Plateau, Fort St. John, and other BC sawmills while operating eleven mills in the United States. It is not West Fraser, which took permanent curtailments and sold mills in British Columbia to direct reinvestment to US assets. Those companies are large, and they are leaving BC.

WFP is staying. It locked in its coastal workforce through 2030 with one of the longest labour agreements in the history of the sector. It is spending down liquidity, and you can see it in the quarterly reports, as it positions itself to take advantage of BC's forestry future in the profitable specialty wood products market.

This is the story of a BC forestry company facing several crises at once, and instead of leaving, they are doubling down on BC and Canada's future.

It's not a tariff, it's an export duty.

When the United States put tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminum, copper, and autos, those were import tariffs. The American buyer pays them at the border. A US steelmaker importing $100 of Canadian steel pays the 50%, and the cost to the buyer becomes $150. The Canadian seller still collects $100. The tax makes the import expensive for the American. It does not reduce what the Canadian producer takes home.

Softwood lumber does not work that way. Softwood lumber duties are export duties, and they land on the seller. WFP ships $100 of lumber into the United States. The combined countervailing and anti-dumping duty rate sits at 35.16% as of August 11, 2025. WFP absorbs that duty out of its own margin. On a $100 sale, WFP nets $64.84, and the US Treasury takes the rest. On top of that sits a separate 10% Section 232 tariff that took effect October 14, 2025, which pushed the all-in burden the company cites to roughly 45% since early 2026. And the kicker, WFP still pays domestic tax on whatever profit survives.

As of December 31, 2025, WFP had $283 million CDN sitting on deposit with the US Treasury, money it has already paid in duties and cannot touch until the dispute is resolved.

Steel and auto tariffs are simple protectionism, and the buyer carries them. Decards of softwood duties are punishment dressed as trade law, and the exporter carries them. The commodity nature of lumber makes it worse. A buyer shopping for a 2x4 does not care whose mill it came from. So when WFP's cost jumps, it cannot pass the duty forward. It eats it. That is the difference between the US making imports expensive and the US making the exporter insolvent.

The Pivot

WFP did the math. It cannot build its way into the US South the way Canfor and West Fraser did, because it does not have the capital to scale. It is a coastal specialty producer, not an Interior commodity giant. It was never fighting Canfor on volume. Different areas, different trees, different game.

What it can do is climb the value chain. Stop shipping rough green commodity lumber into a 35.16% wall. Start making products that are worth more per board foot and harder to replace. Western Red Cedar decking. Thermally modified Hemlock cladding, a product that did not exist in its lineup two years ago. Kiln dried, precision graded Douglas Fir lamstock, the raw material that becomes glulam beams and cross-laminated timber panels.

The company is putting real money behind it. Of the $45 to $50 million in 2026 capital spending, roughly $16 million goes to two continuous dry kilns and a thermal kiln at its Value-Added Division. The first of those kilns was commissioned in the first quarter of 2026, above its startup uptime target. The second is expected to complete in mid-2026, and the thermal kiln in the third quarter of 2026. Specialty products made up 57% of the lumber mix in the first quarter of 2026, up from 51% in the same quarter a year earlier. As the new kilns come online, more of WFP's output shifts from green commodity lumber into kiln dried specialty grades and the lamstock that feeds engineered wood.

WFP's own promotional language describes controlling the value add supply chain every step, from seedling to finished product, its own sawmills feeding its own glulam plants, reducing its export duty exposure while raising its margins.

In 2022, WFP acquired the Calvert glulam operations in Washington State for $12 million US. The Calvert Division runs two glulam plants, in Washougal and Vancouver, Washington, with a combined 35 million board feet of annual capacity. The Fruit Valley operation, also in Vancouver, Washington, expanded into prefabricated glulam assemblies in early 2026.

The BC coast grows the fibre and dries it into lamstock. Plants in Washington state turns that lamstock into finished beams and sells them into the American mass timber market, where over 1,300 projects are built, underway, or designed, and where third party research estimates 4.4 billion board feet of mass timber lumber demand by 2035.

This does not mean that Western Forest Products production is moving into the US.

Across CEO Steven Hofer's earnings calls and interviews, his strategic language is focused on BC coastal's future: fibre supply, Indigenous partnerships, kiln investments, the six-year labour agreement. The Washington plants appear as small operational line items, not the future destination of the company. Everything from his public reported commentary is BC and Canada focused providing a certainty to the Brand Narrative.

WFP's BC commitment is kilns built into its BC mills, which sustains employment and economic stability for all the coastal communities that depend on them, including indigenous.

Plus, Hofer did something unprecedented when it comes to partnering with BC's Indigenous coastal communities signally long term commitment to BC's coastal mills.

In 2024, four Nations, the Tlowitsis, We Wai Kai, Wei Wai Kum, and K'ómoks, acquired a 34% interest in a new partnership called La-kwa sa muqw Forestry for $35.9 million. The partnership holds Tree Farm Licence 64, covering 157,000 hectares near Campbell River and Sayward, with an allowable annual cut of 904,540 cubic metres. WFP keeps a long-term fibre supply agreement. The deal was unprecedented, and it opened the door to others.

In February 2026, WFP agreed to sell its Stillwater Forest Operation outright, 100%, to Qwoqwnes Forestry Holdings, an entity owned by Tla'amin Nation, for $80 million. The deal includes TFL 39 Block 1, roughly 154,000 hectares, with an allowable annual cut of 469,200 cubic metres. The partnership structure gives WFP the cash it needs today to fund the pivot, and it locks in fibre supply for the future. The Indigenous get stewardship over the land and WFP keeps a long-term agreement to buy the fibre in the future. These are uncharted waters, and everyone in BC forestry is watching to see how they play out.

WFP is not liquidating all it's tenure. As of December 31, 2025, it remains the largest timber tenure holder on the BC coast, with seven Tree Farm Licences, five Forest Licences, and a total available cut of 5.6 million cubic metres, roughly 92% of it flowing from those TFLs. It renewed two of them in 2025, signalling certainty in future fibre supply and commitment to BC's economy.

"For the first time in the last 20 years on the B.C. Coast, you will have certainty of supply. But it's going to take that type of commitment to build plans from the ground up. It takes time." He is asking for time, because in the short term the numbers do not look good, while the long term could bring significantly higher profit, if they survive the transition.

WFP's commitment to their indigenous partnerships is only half of their partnerships keeping them securely in BC's coastal communities. They recently negotiated a 6 year long term commitment to their own mill workforce.

WFP's labour costs are stable through 2030 due to a six-year agreements with the United Steelworkers covering both its main coastal workforce and its La-kwa sa muqw partnership operation. Both agreements expire June 14, 2030. These are among the longest deals in the sector's history, and they provide certainty in a chaotic geopolitical trade environment.

The Canadian and BC governments are also working to secure that certainty by providing a domestic market for companies like Western Forest Products.

In February 2026, the federal government launched the second phase of the largest military housing construction campaign since the post-war era. Delivered by the Canadian Forces Housing Agency in collaboration with Build Canada Homes, the program will build roughly 7,500 new units across Phases 1 and 2, at 25 sites spanning six regions, backed by an advance procurement notice valued at more than $3.7 billion. The build specifies modern methods of construction, modular and prefabricated systems, and low-carbon Canadian materials including lumber. It also sets a target of at least 5% of contract value going to Indigenous businesses.

These specifications are what WFP is building. Prefab manufacturers need WFP's kiln dried lamstock and specialty wood products to win government contracts. WFP is positioning itself securely into the supply chain for the Build Canada Homes developments of non market housing in cities across Canada, military basis, and indigenous communities.

This Large federal housing build is supposed to be a 12 month cycle at minimum, so the earliest material orders could land around early 2027. WFP still has to survive the gap between now and then. The advantage is sequence. Its last kiln will all be installed by later this year, which gives it time to ramp production before demand for lamstock arrives.

WFP's coastal specialty woods, Douglas Fir for glulam beams, Western Red Cedar for exterior decking, Hemlock for thermal modification, all come from BC's coastal forests and are what the Asian markets want. By reaching out to their contacts across the Pacific the company is marketing it's products to a variety of countries, not relying on the US market.

The Indigenous partnerships, long labour contracts, supply chain positioning for government building, along with selling specialty wood products into Asian markets is a strategy that is defensible, and it is differentiated to be resilient. But can the company be resilient long enough for the new demand to materialize?

WFP is becoming an engineered wood processor anchored by Indigenous partnerships, with a longterm labour force cost agreements in place, calibrating to mass timber markets, and betting that the future of BC forestry is precision manufacturing, not volume production.

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Shannon Peel is a Brand Narrative and Communications Strategist. She builds strategic brand storytelling ecosystems, the systems that help businesses, executives, and thought leaders earn authority, credibility, and citations across the digital landscape. Shannon writes about brand strategy, marketing, the Canadian economy, business resilience, and the evolving gig economy. She is a published author and host of the BrandAPeel Podcast.

Sources: Western Forest Products 2025 Annual Report and Management's Discussion and Analysis (February 10, 2026); WFP Q1 2026 Results (May 2026); WFP Annual Information Form (February 10, 2026); WFP press releases on the Calvert acquisition (July 2022), the LFLP ratification (February 24, 2026), and the Tla'amin Stillwater agreement (February 19, 2026); West Fraser Q4 2025 and full-year 2025 results (February 2026); Canfor Annual Information Form (February 2026); White House Section 232 Proclamation (September 29, 2025); Congressional Research Service, US-Canada Trade Relations (March 2026) and US-Canada Softwood Lumber Trade (December 2025); McMillan LLP DRIPA analysis (April 2026); CBC News coverage of DRIPA and Aboriginal title (April and May 2026); Business in Vancouver (February 2026); The Columbian (February 2026); Powell River Peak (February 2026); Canadian Forest Industries CEO interview (June 2023); PitchBook and TipRanks company data (2026). WFP Q1 2026 results, May (2026); TipRanks earnings summary, February (2026) WFP acquisition release, (July 2022) WFP Q1 2026 results West Fraser Q4 2025 results, February 2026 Canadian Forest Industries, June 2023. The Columbian, February 26, 2026. WFP and BC Government releases, 2024 to 2026 White House Proclamation, September 29, 2025; Congressional Research Service, December 2025. Congressional Research Service, US-Canada Trade Relations, March 2026; Section 232 steel and aluminium tariffs at fifty percent. Canfor Annual Information Form, February 2026. WFP 2025 Annual Report, Management's Discussion and Analysis, February 10, 2026. West Fraser 2025 results; industry analysis, Coldwell Banker Horizon Realty, May 2026. (WFP release, February 19, 2026; Powell River Peak, February 2026)