Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC) welcomes the Government of Canada’s announcement today on addressing long‑standing, structural challenges across the country’s transportation supply chains.
Reliable, efficient, and cost‑effective transportation networks are essential to the forest sector’s ability to support domestic manufacturing, reach global markets, and sustain jobs in hundreds of rural and Indigenous communities across Canada.
“Canada’s transportation system continues to face three fundamental challenges—cost pressures driven by limited competition, infrastructure bottlenecks across key trade corridors, and ongoing labour instability,” said Derek Nighbor, FPAC President and CEO. “Addressing these issues together is essential to reducing costs for shippers, improving system reliability, and supporting long‑term economic growth and jobs across hundreds of forest-dependent communities.”
Currently, the forest sector must absorb billions of dollars in freight costs annually, the vast majority of these accruing from rail transportation - representing more than 15% of the sector's annual GDP contribution and up to 25% of a shipper's delivered product costs. Worsening costs have become a constraint and forest producers are paying the price, hampering their ability to compete in international markets.
FPAC welcomes the opportunity to engage constructively with government and partners as discussions move forward. A durable, collaborative approach that improves efficiency, resilience, and accountability across the transportation system will be critical to supporting domestic value‑added production and export growth in the forest sector.
More detail on the forest sector’s transportation priorities is available in FPAC’s policy brief, Fixing Canada’s Transportation Supply Chains: Solutions for a Competitive Forest Sector.
About FPAC
FPAC provides a voice for Canada’s wood, pulp, and paper producers nationally and internationally in government, trade, and environmental affairs. As an industry, we contributed $19.9B in real GDP in 2025.
Canada's forest products sector is one of the country’s largest employers—providing nearly 200,000 direct jobs and operating in hundreds of communities across the country. Our members are committed to collaborating with Indigenous leaders, government bodies, and other key stakeholders to develop across-Canada action plan aimed at advancing forest health, while supporting workers, communities and our environment for the long term.
