Canada

It's expensive to pay first world workers with modern worker rights and work safety regulations in Canada .... and heaven forbid if they are unionized workers.

It's cheaper to export the raw materials to a country with cheap labor, few or no worker laws and lax safety regulations ... and definitely no unionized labor.

The government wants to build the nation .... by allowing companies to skirt as many laws as possible to maximize profits and build the nation's businesses and corporations in the vain hope that these companies will actually share their profits and benefits.

it's a bit like crude oil. lumber cut up to what standards? or maybe chipboard or veneer or paper or cellulose fiber (used in many things including artillery propellant, hot commodity lately)? or maybe some form of chemically modified cellulose or maybe something else? then do you have industrial capacity and logistics for that? what if customer from egypt won't accept fiberboard made to an argentinian standard, that you made for an argentinian customer that changed mind or the other way around? canada is a rich country, can you make it competitive? sometimes it works. i heard of a case of company that bought logs from finland, processed them in poland into fiberboard and sold them, at least once, to a customer in tanzania

Agreed. Keep the logs in their community. Ship a finished product.

Can they be made into finished lumber in Canada at a cost that would allow them to sell for a profit into export markets? What would it take to achieve this?

Blame Eby, him and Horgan are why this continues.

They prefer corporate profits to sustainable jobs.

If it makes you feel better it's going to Japan.

They burn them in the UK for energy. Yep trees are carbon neutral.

I suppose we could.

One tradeoff is that the planks or finish products will have to be wrapped in very large amounts of plastic to avoid damage in-transit.

Another hurdle is there would need to be major changes in operation. Did you see those funny shaped boats that drag logs around in the water? You can't do that with finished lumber or manufactured products. They should expand the E&N railway to accommodate freight delivery and open passenger service.