Canada has won another round in the softwood lumber dispute with America after the Senate voted to repeal a law which would have handed US forest product companies billions of dollars in Canadian import duties.
The senate voted 51-50 to repeal the Byrd Amendment, with US vice-president Dick Cheney using his casting vote to break the initial tie.
About C$5bn in duties collected by the US treasury would have been handed to American lumber firms under the Byrd Amendment, which was originally introduced to help struggling US steel companies suffering from foreign competition.
The law would have applied to Canadian softwood duties once all final legal appeals in the dispute were exhausted, predicted to be 2007.
However, the repeal still has to go back to the House of Representatives for technical reasons before president George Bush can formally remove it as law.
Canada has welcomed the repeal but wants to see it implemented immediately to remove any possibility of money being handed out to US firms before 2007.
