Canadian Lumber Parties Oppose Commerce's Request for More Time to File Remand Results
The Commerce Department didn’t articulate good cause when it requested a deadline extension for its Canadian softwood lumber redetermination on remand, Canadian parties said in a Feb. 10 brief (Government of Canada v. United States, CIT Consol. # 23-00187).
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Their case was remanded in July by the trade court after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected the way Commerce was then using its Cohen’s d test in a separate case. Commerce responded to CAFC’s ruling by switching to its new “price differences” test wherever it had previously used the Cohen’s d test.
The department “indicated” that it would be using “the same cookie-cutter approach” in the lumber case at issue, the Canadian parties said.
“Application of this test involves replacing the SAS computer programming code that had been used to apply Cohen’s d with SAS code that applies the Price Difference Test’s two-percent threshold to the same data,” it said. “Since July 2025, when Commerce adopted the Price Difference Test to replace the Cohen’s d test, Commerce has applied this replacement test in more than 70 proceedings and to approximately one hundred different respondents’ data.”
And, sure enough, Commerce’s draft remand results were eight pages long and simply used the new test instead of the old one, they said.
But the government requested a 45-day extension anyway, citing the partial government shutdown, they said.
They said they had been willing to negotiate with the department for a shorter 20-day extension that still cut into their own response time so that briefing could still be completed on schedule. This extension, however, was too long, especially since the department hadn’t reopened the record and didn’t have any new information to consider, they said.
They said that Commerce hasn’t shown that it has been diligent in attempting to meet the current deadline, either, which was the test it was required to meet to receive an extension.
“Indeed, given the nature of the remand and the uniform approach that Commerce has taken to implement the direction of this Court and the Federal Circuit, it is difficult to contemplate why Commerce would have needed a full six months to generate the eight-page Draft Remand Results that it issued on December 22, 2025,” they said.