The U.S. Department of Commerce has ended countervailing duties on supercalendered paper from Canada that have been in place since 2015. The Government of Canada welcomes the decision by the United States to rescind its duties on imports of Canadian supercalendered paper and to refund all duties collected since August 2015.
On July 5, 2018, the WTO circulated a panel report concerning Canada’s challenge to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s subsidy determination against Canadian supercalendered paper and a U.S. practice of finding Canadian exporters to be non-cooperative, and then artificially increasing the subsidy rate assessed on them during the duty investigation.
The panel found that the Department of Commerce’s practices breached numerous WTO obligations.
It also found that the Department of Commerce improperly included an inflated subsidy rate for non-cooperation in an average rate for other Canadian companies that were later found to have minimal or no subsidy rates.
On July 6, 2018, the Department of Commerce announced that it was revoking the duty measure, effective July 5, 2018. Canada welcomes this action.