Canada's nascent mass timber industry escaped a direct hit from the Trump administration’s latest trade war salvo over the weekend.

But steep US levies on the wider Canadian forestry sector still present sizable challenges for manufacturers as they chase a global market for engineered wood forecast to grow to more than US$12 billion by 2035.

Canadian lumber and wood products were among the hardest hit by the US tariffs imposed after trade talks collapsed late last Friday. Duties as high as 50 per cent threaten to undercut an industry that shipped 82 per cent of its forest-product exports — worth around $30 billion, according to government figures — south of the border in 2024.

Engineered-wood products such as cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glulam, pitched by developers as a lower-carbon alternative to traditional steel and concrete, were left off the latest tariff list (see factbox below).

Yet the emerging mass timber industry could feel the “broader hit” dealt to Canadian manufacturers, according to the head of the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC), an industry body.