Ottawa Promised a $1.2B Lumber Push. Now It’s Paying to Find Five Buyers.

Before Ottawa sends another consultant cheque, Canadians deserve the five-country buyer list, the export targets and the delivery ledger.

Ottawa’s softwood-lumber strategy now has a simple credibility problem: after promising a major market-diversification push, Natural Resources Canada has posted an advance contract award notice for a consultant to identify five offshore buyer countries.

The CanadaBuys notice, published September 1, says NRCan is seeking a comprehensive analysis of likely offshore growth markets for softwood lumber demand and Canada’s ability to compete in those markets. The work is supposed to identify five countries outside Canada and the United States with the strongest opportunities, assess end-use demand, examine whether Canadian sawmills would need new machinery, estimate export-volume potential and capital investment, and deliver a report plus presentation to NRCan.

That is not nothing. Good analysis can matter. But Canadians were already sold something much bigger. On August 5, 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a softwood-lumber package that included up to $700 million in loan guarantees, $500 million to “supercharge product and market diversification,” and a promise to diversify international markets for Canadian forest products. The PMO also said 66 percent of Canada’s softwood production was exported in 2024, and nearly 90 percent of those exports went to the United States.

Nearly a year later, the public record shows Ottawa still buying a report to name five best markets. The proposed contract is an ACAN, meaning the government has pre-identified a supplier while giving others a chance to prove they can meet the requirements before the September 16 deadline. The supplier listed in the PDF is Forest Economics Advisors LLC of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. The estimated value is $80,000 plus GST/HST. Blacklock’s Reporter summarized it as $84,000 and tied it directly to Carney’s earlier $1.2 billion promise.

The accountability issue is not the size of one contract. In federal spending terms, $80,000 is pocket change. The issue is sequencing. If Ottawa had a $1.2 billion plan to transform an export-dependent industry, why are taxpayers only now seeing a buyer-country search? What market list existed before the big announcement? Which foreign buyers, codes, builders, distributors and trade barriers were already mapped? What measurable export gains have been booked since the promise?

Conservatives should ask for receipts, not slogans. Publish the procurement file. Publish the statement of work, scoring rationale, milestones, intellectual-property terms and final report when delivered. Publish the five countries, the market-selection criteria, the retooling cost estimates and the export targets. Most importantly, publish a softwood diversification ledger showing every dollar approved under the $500 million diversification stream, every recipient, every project, every expected market, and every shipment result.

Canadian mill workers do not need another Ottawa speech about resilience while the buyer list sits behind a consultant’s report. If Carney’s lumber plan is working, the government should be able to show the markets, contracts and export volumes. If it is still looking for buyers, say so plainly — before writing more cheques.