Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC) and Canada Wood welcome the renewed memorandum of understanding between Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) and China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD), aimed at strengthening practical cooperation to support modern wood construction and expand international market opportunities for Canadian forest products.
Forestry directly employs over 200,000 Canadians and supports another 200,000 jobs across transportation, maintenance, and manufacturing. The stability of hundreds of rural and northern communities depends on a strong forest sector.
Market context
China’s built-environment market is enormous: in 2024, developers started roughly 739million m² of new building floor space, and China’s housing ministry reported over 60,000 urban renewal projects supported by 2.9 trillion Chinese yuan—aboutC$577 billion at recent Bank of Canada exchange rates.
With China’s real estate sector slowing down, the country’s focus is increasingly shifting toward “high-quality” urban renewal and greener, more resilient communities, creating new demand for industrialized, faster-to-build, low-carbon construction solutions.
The renewed MOU aims to facilitate practical, government-to-government technical cooperation, including training and best-practice exchanges, leveraging prefabrication benefits, advancing demonstration projects, and collaborating on international standards for modern wood construction.
Bruce St. John, Canada Wood Group:
“Mark Carney’s visit to China is an important opportunity to reset the relationship and refocus on practical cooperation. Renewing the NRCan–MOHURDMOU builds on more than a decade of proven collaboration that helped modern wood construction take root in China. With climate goals, urbanization, and industrialized construction all moving in the same direction, this is the right moment to scale up technical cooperation and expand the role of Canadian wood in China’s construction sector.”
Derek Nighbor, President and CEO, Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC):
“Concurrent to ongoing efforts to overcome our trade challenges with the United States, it is important that we build upon the successes of existing export partnerships and seek to build new ones. Renewing this Canada-China MOU creates not only opportunity to sell more Canadian wood overseas, but it also enables the export of Canadian know-how and technical support to help shape the future of China’s wood construction industry.”
About FPAC
FPAC provides a voice for Canada’s wood, pulp, and paperproducers nationally and internationally in government, trade, andenvironmental affairs. As an industry, we contributed $21B in real GDP in 2024.Canada's forest products sector is one of the country’s largestemployers—providing 200,000 direct jobs and operating in hundreds ofcommunities across the country. Our members are committed to collaborating withIndigenous leaders, government bodies, and other key stakeholders to develop across-Canada action plan aimed at advancing forest health, while supportingworkers, communities and our environment for the long term.
About Canada Wood Group
Funded by Canada’s federal and provincial governments as well as the forestry industries, Canada Wood Group supports the diversification of global markets by promoting Canadian wood products and wood construction systems through advancing technologies.
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