Canada’s Wildfires Drive US Lumber Prices to a 12-Month High

Rubber and Wood | 2026-07-28 00:18:39 | By Paul Ploumis

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): Wildfires burning across Western Canada have pushed the benchmark US lumber price to its highest level in a year, with the Chicago futures contract settling at US$650.06 per thousand board feet on Monday, 5.3 per cent higher over the month. That is according to exchange pricing tracked by Trading Economics, which shows the contract clearing $640 last week for the first time since July 2025 as more than 900 blazes burned across the region over the weekend.

British Columbia, the country’s largest lumber-exporting province, is bearing the worst of it, with the BC Wildfire Service counting 89 active fires after nearly 34,000 lightning strikes in a single week set the central and southern Interior alight. The Pear Lake and Fiftynine Creek fires merged late on Saturday into a single front covering more than 63,000 hectares near Clinton, destroying homes on the town’s outskirts and forcing Monday morning’s evacuation of 70 Mile House.

“No rain in sight,” Hugh Murdoch, incident commander on the Bootleg Complex fires threatening the city of Kimberley, said of a forecast he called far from favourable, with nearly three dozen evacuation orders standing across the province. The Thompson-Nicola Regional District’s expanded order alone puts 650 addressed properties under evacuation around 70 Mile House, with the wildfire service bracing for “extreme fire behaviour” on the merged front.

Smoke has drifted into the trade fight, with BC Forests Minister Ravi Parmar opening last week’s provincial fire briefing by criticising Donald Trump for accusing Canada of poisoning American air, a charge Parmar rejected as his province fought 85 fires at once.

Supply lines were straining before the smoke, with Madison’s Lumber Reporter counting the Eastern spruce-pine-fir pipeline leaner than at any point in the past two years, and Western mills holding their price lists with order files sold weeks forward. Southern Yellow Pine producers pushed asking prices $10 to $15 above print through early July as freight costs climbed.

Fire risk moves the futures market harder than the cash market because the contract is thinly traded, with fewer than 9,500 lots changing hands, and every threat to British Columbia supply pulls buyers in and offers away at once. That spruce-pine-fir feeds mills across the United States, so a fire season that curtails logging, halts sawmills, or cuts the rail lines out reprices the whole board, and both the 2021 and 2023 fire spikes gave back their gains once the threat passed.

It comes as the rally builds behind a tariff wall that holds the effective rate on most Canadian softwood at 34.83 per cent, weeks after Trump’s Section 338 proclamations spared lumber from the 50 per cent duties on $20 billion of Canadian goods on 19 August. Canada’s peak forestry body has since identified 98 tariff lines targeting forest products in the same orders, with plywood, fibreboard, and particleboard all subject to the new rate.

Framing lumber has climbed more than 30 per cent off its December lows, a rebound driven by sawmill closures and thinning Canadian shipments that cut US softwood imports 24 per cent in the first quarter, even as Canada supplied 84 per cent of the trade. Combined duties and tariffs have added at least $10,000 to the cost of a new American home, according to the National Association of Home Builders’ estimate.

Courtesy: www.woodcentral.com.au