Five years after the global shortages of toilet paper at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump’s proposed tariffs on Canadian lumber could leave U.S. stores struggling to stock it once again.
The Trump administration had threatened to hike tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber to 27% as soon as April 2, and possibly to as high as 50% by an unspecified date, Bloomberg reported. That could have a big impact on the availability of northern bleached softwood kraft pulp (NBSK), a material derived from wood chips that is used to make toilet paper and paper towels.
Last year, the U.S. imported 2 million tons of Canadian NBSK, Brian McClay, chairman of Trusted Providers of Global Pulp Market Information, told Bloomberg, noting that Canadian pulp is prized for toilet paper.
“Some of these mills in the United States, some of the big branded products, not only want softwood pulp from Canada, they want softwood pulp from this particular mill — they’ve been using it for 30 years and they will not change,” McClay said.
Earlier this month, Jean-François Samray, CEO of the Quebec Forest Industry Council, told Global News that the United States is “far from being self-sufficient” when it comes to softwood lumber. Trump’s proposed tariffs, he added, could result in Americans panic-buying toilet paper as they did when the pandemic broke out.
“Well,” he said, “we’ve seen it before.”
Even the threat of steep new tariffs could have an impact on the supply of goods like toilet paper, experts say.
“If you start getting really nervous and start stockpiling goods, and a lot of other people do that too, you can actually create high prices and shortages where there isn’t even a tariff effect. So I wouldn’t really recommend doing that,” Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics and trade at the Cato Institute, told NPR.
If Trump’s tariffs do go into effect, the cost of lumber will rise, fewer trees will be harvested and the supply of wood chips used to make pulp will diminish. That, McClay told Bloomberg, will affect both the supply of toilet paper and its price.
“Because we don’t really cut trees for making pulp in Canada, we depend on residual chips from sawmills. It would certainly boost the cost and probably reduce output,” he said.
On Friday, however, Trump said in a social media post that he had “an extremely productive call” with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Without specifying a final decision on how he will implement new lumber tariffs, Trump said he would meet with Carney after Canada’s elections on April 28 to “work on elements of Politics, Business, and all other factors that will end up being great for both the United States of America and Canada.”
A day earlier, Carney had declared that the U.S. was “no longer a reliable trading partner” to Canada. He has also hit back at the U.S. over Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods.
“The Prime Minister informed the President that his government will implement retaliatory tariffs to protect Canadian workers and our economy, following the announcement of additional U.S. trade actions on April 2, 2025,” a statement issued Friday from Carney’s office read.
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Yahoo News
