Canada Just Posted Its Best Mill Gate Prices Since March 2025
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
Factory gate prices for Canadian wood have climbed for a seventh straight month, with Statistics Canada measuring the run on an index that excludes tariffs from the calculation altogether.
Stickered stacks of sawn timber stand in a mill yard in the Kootenays, British Columbia, the point at which Statistics Canada prices Canadian wood before a tariff, a sales tax, or a freight charge is added. (Photo Credit: Valmedia Creatives / Dreamstime.com, image 168574776)
Canadian wood products left the factory gate in July at their highest prices since March 2025, with the group climbing 3.2 per cent against a 0.6 per cent rise across the whole industrial index. That is according to Statistics Canada, whose Industrial Product Price Index measures what producers receive before any tariffs, sales taxes, or freight are added.
“Although the IPPI does not measure the direct effect of tariffs on prices, tariffs may indirectly influence prices measured in the IPPI,” the agency wrote in the note attached to the release. Imported inputs subject to duty can raise what Canadian producers charge, and tariffs on Canadian imports or exports can shift the same numbers through supply and demand.
Wood rose fourth fastest of 22 commodity groups in July, ahead of every metal, mineral, and chemical line, in a month the wires covered as an energy story. (Graphic: Wood Central; Data: Statistics Canada, Table 18-10-0265-01)
Wood products last cost more in March 2025, when the group reached 138.8, and the agency told readers tariff threats and growing spring demand were pushing prices up. Over the twelve months to July, the group gained 7.6 per cent, short of the 12.4 per cent the index as a whole added.
Prices for softwood lumber jumped 6.1 per cent in June, the largest monthly rise since November 2024 and the sixth of seven straight increases for the group. Pulp and paper climbed 5.1 per cent in July, while the index without energy and petroleum fell 0.2 per cent.
Log decks fill the yard at the Weyerhaeuser sawmill in Princeton, British Columbia, photographed in June 2025, where softwood lumber has driven six of the seven monthly price gains Statistics Canada has now recorded. (Photo Credit: Nalidsa Sukprasert / Dreamstime.com, image 388900764)
Statistics Canada gave energy, metals, chemicals, and crops their own paragraphs in the July release, and gave wood none. When American duties moved wood prices in October, the agency said so, describing buyers who brought orders forward ahead of a 10 per cent tariff effective from 14 October.
It comes as a 50 per cent American duty on Canadian plywood took effect on Saturday, and nine of every ten cubic metres of lumber Canada exports still cross that border. Buyers in China took 10.8 per cent more Canadian lumber across the first half, in a market where overall softwood imports fell by a fifth and Russian shipments dropped 21.8 per cent.
Comments