A provincial election in the heart of Canada’s lumber country is exposing the limits of using US President Donald Trump as a political foil, even in one of the places hardest hit by his tariffs.

On Sep. 22, British Columbia Premier David Eby called an election two years early, after the collapse of US-Canada trade talks, seeking to win a stronger mandate by tapping into the defiant Canadian patriotism that’s erupted in the face of Trump’s threats. Eby’s speech that day invoked Trump’s name more than 20 times, hammering on his threat to the lumber industry, while not naming any rival Canadian politicians.

A similar strategy worked for Prime Minister Mark Carney, who swept to power last year promising to defy the president and has seen his popularity surge after walking away from a tariff deal with the White House.

It isn’t panning out so neatly for Eby. Two days before the Oct. 24 vote, he was five points behind his BC Conservative opponents, according to pollster Leger. They hastily appointed an interim leader, Lorne Doerkson, who isn’t as Trump-like as the party’s previous leadership, is also publicly opposing the president, but says many of the province’s problems are homegrown, not Washington’s fault.

“It could go down as a historic miscalculation,” said Kathryn Harrison, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia. If Eby loses, there’ll be almost no left-wing premiers in Canada.

The provincial showdown highlights the trade-war dilemma weighing on Canada and other countries that have drawn Trump’s ire: Is the best response matching his aggressive stance with bans on US products and threats to withhold critical resources? Or is a better strategy to try and tune out the US while cutting regulations at home?

Figuring out that answer is urgent as the US tariffs scar regional economies. In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, auto plants have been idled and one has been put up for sale, while steelworkers have been laid off. Aluminum fabricators concentrated in the country’s east say their US business is “dead” with new tariffs.

In British Columbia, the lumber industry is reeling. The sector says it sustains almost 4% of BC’s jobs and provides some of the best-paying work. Eby’s rivals say the way to save it is less about performatively sticking it to Trump, and more about cutting bureaucracy, revamping environmental rules and reforming Indigenous land rights.

“Eby is very clearly trying to set up this election as running against somebody who’s not in the race — running against Donald Trump,” said Stewart Prest, another political science professor at UBC. “If you’re not Mark Carney in early 2025, I don’t think it works. And there’s certainly value in standing up for a united Canada, but the context matters.”

More than half of Canadian timber is sold south to the US, and that’s been the foundation of many Canadian cities, and fortunes. W.A.C. Bennett, who ran BC from 1952 to 1972, called the acrid stench of pulp mills “the smell of money,” and Eby has called forestry “core to the province’s identity.”But facing duties and tariffs totaling almost 35% in the US, Canada is feeling the downside of relying on one big customer. Mills are shuttering almost every month, costing hundreds of jobs apiece. BC had 3,600 fewer forestry and logging jobs in March 2026 compared with five years earlier, according to Statistics Canada.

Eby and Carney are racing against the clock to lessen their country’s US dependence, and have made progress selling more oil and gas to Asia. But the pivot doesn’t work so well for lumber for a few reasons: it’s cut to US specifications, it’s bulky and awkward to ship, and faces competition in Asia from cheap Russian wood.

Carney has announced more than C$1.2 billion in aid to the forestry industry to stanch the bleeding from the US trade dispute. But production in the first four months of 2026 nonetheless fell 10% versus last year, according to industry analyst Russ Taylor.

It’s all testing voters’ patience and their political loyalties, and the election in British Columbia will gauge that sentiment.

“It’s devastating to lose access to the US market, which is functionally what’s happened here,” Eby said in an interview. “We can’t replace that market,” he acknowledged, but said Canada should pursue more trade deals with countries like India to help create new markets for its lumber and other goods.

While working on these files, Eby has highlighted his anger at Trump, who he’s called “clearly unhinged” and “a bully.”He’s one of many premiers to pull US booze from liquor store shelves. He canceled his own family’s vacation to a Walt Disney Co. park in 2025 while encouraging citizens to boycott the US. Last year, he also pulled subsidies for Tesla Inc. electric vehicle chargers, singling out the company “because of Elon Musk.”

More recently, he announced new road signs for the US border saying Canada “will never be the 51st state, sorry!”His rivals in the Conservative Party have, at times, sounded much more sympathetic to Trump. One candidate said “Eby needs to comply” with US demands to avert tariffs. But since the election was called, the Conservatives have adapted their messaging.

“Trump is an absolute bully,” Doerkson said during his first press conference as interim leader, but Eby’s party “spent ten years dismantling industry in this province and made it so much more able to be attacked.”Lines like that may have neutralized some of the attacks Eby started his campaign with, according to UBC’s Prest. The Conservative Party of BC didn’t make Doerkson available for an interview.

In parts of British Columbia, some towns and cities’ economies rely almost exclusively on forestry. The industry was already struggling under domestic frustrations like wildfires and bureaucracy. But Trump’s policy has turned what was an awful stretch into a catastrophe.

On July 14, Canfor Corp. closed a mill in Prince George, BC, cutting 300 jobs. That’s a blow for a city whose mascot is an anthropomorphic log. A smaller Prince George company, Brink Forest Products Ltd., cut staffing levels by 75% since US duties and tariffs escalated last year, according to founder John Brink.

In the city of 100 Mile House, a six-hour drive north of Vancouver, West Fraser Timber Co. shut its sawmill in December, meaning the end of 165 local jobs.

Mill closures risk families leaving for better prospects elsewhere, taking away critically needed workers like healthcare professionals, Mayor Maureen Pinkney said. The emergency department at 100 Mile House District General Hospital closed more than two dozen times in 2025, typically due to a lack of staff. In January, a woman having a heart attack died en route to the next closest hospital, an hour away, according to Pinkney.

One of the lumber sector’s main complaints is a lack of access to wood — even though Canada is blanketed with an estimated 318 billion trees. After past generations’ breakneck logging, valuable remaining trees are harder to reach and pricier to access. Eby’s ruling New Democratic Party has also moved to protect some pristine forests.

It’s also complicated to deal with BC’s more-than 200 Indigenous groups, whose rights over their traditional territories prevent the old “rip and ship” approach.

There’s also another factor outside politicians’ immediate control: Canada’s forests have been ravaged by natural disasters. In 2023 alone, 2.8 million hectares burned in BC — 8,200 times the size of Central Park. Ongoing fires follow an epidemic of pine beetles, which no longer die off in winter because it’s not cold enough.

Some industry observers fear that as each facility closes it compromises others, by removing a link from a supply chain built up over decades. When a sawmill shuts, for example, a pulp and paper mill loses its supply of wood chips, or has to source them from much farther afield.

Despite launching his election focused on Trump, Eby acknowledges that deep domestic reforms are needed.

“The reality is there is too much red tape in forestry permits,” Eby said. “The application process takes too long. There’s unpredictability in its current form that makes it incredibly challenging for business to plan. Those are all serious problems.”The Conservatives want to repeal a 2019 law which mandates the province uphold the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and which Doerkson and his party says drags vast swathes of property and business rights into profound uncertainty. Eby unsuccessfully attempted to pause or amend that law earlier this year.

It’s uncertain whether any strategy will be enough to sustain the industry’s current scale in BC. Though many forestry companies are still headquartered in the province, their center of gravity has been drifting south for years.

In 2001, 100% of Interfor Corp.’s harvest was from British Columbia, but now it’s less than 20%. In July, the company told employees it would migrate some corporate office functions out of the Vancouver region. The destination for those jobs would make Trump smile: they’ll be in Peachtree, Georgia.