Commerce puts a Quebec sawmill back under the lumber duty order at 1.05%

On August 6, 2026 the Commerce Department published amended final results of a countervailing duty expedited review covering a single Quebec producer, Les Produits Forestiers D&G Ltée and its affiliate Portbec, for calendar 2015. The company's original subsidy rate of 0.21% had been de minimis, which excluded it from the softwood lumber order; after a series of court remands the rate was recalculated at 1.05%, the U.S. Court of International Trade entered final judgment sustaining that figure on July 21, and Commerce has now reinstated the company in the order and instructed Customs to collect cash deposits at 1.05% on its entries from the publication date [1].

The amounts are trivial. The mechanism is not. A dispute over whether one mill's 2015 rate was 0.21% or 1.05% took until 2026 to settle, which is the timescale on which every Canadian producer's deposits are eventually resolved [1][2]. West Fraser, which posts deposits at a combined 26.47%, is still waiting for final results of the seventh review, covering 2024 entries, that Commerce said in April it intended to issue within 120 days and that would set its rate at the preliminary 4.77% anti-dumping and 16.15% countervailing figures [3][4].

For a U.S. reader the note is a reminder that "duty" in this trade means a deposit whose final size is decided years later by Commerce and the courts, and that the balance on a Canadian producer's books is an estimate until the Federal Register says otherwise.