New Brunswick Private Timberland Log Sellers Find Better Prices for their Logs in Maine

New Brunswick, Canada lumber mills are supplied mostly from timber cut on publicly owned Crown land. In turn, private sellers contend that because the New Brunswick government does not raise the price it charges for trees to match rising lumber prices, as most provinces do, the prices they can charge mills are kept artificially low.

In response to that, New Brunswick Natural Resources Minister Mike Holland criticized timber royalty systems that rise and fall with lumber prices even though every province west of New Brunswick uses some form of floating charges. Holland said New Brunswick’s “stable steady” approach, where it set rates back in 2015 and has not changed them since, has been better over the long term.

“I’ve explained it several times that if we had to follow that model of chasing the commodity from 2015 that Alberta did, because of the significant swings not just high but low, there would been over $50 million over that five-year period that we as New Brunswick would have left on the table,” Holland told reporters last spring.

However, with international lumber prices once again climbing higher, New Brunswick private wood sellers are saying that those higher prices are helping them get better prices for their softwood logs… in the State of Maine.

Linda Bell, the general manager of the Carleton-Victoria Forest Products Marketing Board in Florenceville, NB, said prices being paid for saw logs at mills across the border are up to 70 percent higher than in New Brunswick. That makes the longer hauling distances and increased paperwork required to serve U.S. mills worthwhile, she said.

“What we’re seeing in Maine is an increased demand and increased pricing,” said Bell, who estimated a quarter of softwood cut by private sellers in her area is now leaving the province.

“They have no Crown wood. They’re on an open market,” Bell said about the trade for logs in Maine. “We’re seeing pricing closer to fair market values there, than what we see in New Brunswick.”

Bell concluded that “The price of lumber is up, and their markets are really good.”