I'm not a fan of protectionism either, but that particular example is not true at all.
Lumber prices rose because at the start of the pandemic, the industry predicted a housing crash and took drastic steps to downsize and then the exact opposite happened. And we were left with a garden-variety supply vs demand situation.
Speaking as a Canadian, U.S. trade protectionism is nothing new. It happens all the time and frequently targets allies like Canada rather than rivals like China. What U.S. citizens should watch out for is when U.S. protectionism winds up hurting the U.S.'s own economy. e.g. Tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber may have helped out a few U.S. softwood lumber producers with good lobbyists (and Jimmy Carter), but the increase in lumber prices had a much larger negative impact on the U.S. economy as a whole due to higher costs of building materials impacting pretty much everyone.
At what cost though? I've heard this protectionist argument from a friend of mine many times before, and it always ends up circling back to his current employer, who if there had been larger economic/regulatory barriers in his industry a decade and change or so ago, would likely not exist.
Protectionism has its place, but we should fully evaluate the cost, damage and benefits created by protectionist policies before implementing them, otherwise you end up with massively subsidized US corn crushing our NAFTA partner's agriculture industry, and Chinese Steel being dumped on the US at significantly lower prices than the US Steel industry can produce said metal at (mostly due to Chinese state subsidies, just like our agribusiness subsidies).
I think it fair to say that there are both problems and benefits. Our steel and aluminum tariffs are resulting in more jobs in steel and aluminum. On the other hand, it is resulting in fewer jobs that treat steel and aluminum as the raw product. So this impacts production of nails, buildings, ships, cars, airplanes, and a ton of things I don't have the space to list here. This is well before we even get to the inevitable response from China, Canada and Europe which has impacts like this, leaving farmers unable to sell their crop.
So yes, there are more steel and aluminum jobs. But in hand there are also less jobs in farming, building construction, ship building, nail manufacture, and plane manufacturing. So the question becomes what do you value more, people working a smelter or people building airplanes, etc. Well, most people who study this have found that the effect of protectionism is fewer jobs overall and higher prices.
You can choose to disbelieve this and irrationally point to 19th century economies as a counter example while refusing to acknowledge that many factors are always in play and trade is one of them, but this is the argument being made.
So you believe that the US is a victim of protectionism in these countries without having protectionism of it's own? That's a pretty hard position to back with evidence.
For example US farm subsidies are significant and supply management is common in many areas, but the rhetoric around Canadian dairy supply management recently has been amplified far beyond even it's wildest possible impact. And this with a country with extraordinarily balanced trade, if anything probably a deficit. The history of trade between the two countries is littered with spats about US protecting this, Canada protecting that, but on the whole very balanced. Pretending otherwise may make for good politics (i guess that remains to be seen) but it isn't based on evidence or good policy work.
Because all of the protectionism in Canada is in support of local interests: dairy farmers, brewers, etc. Remove the trade barriers, and the crappy ones will die. That's a much bigger deal politically than the win from efficient firms doing better and prices going down.
The federal government just has no real incentive, short of it actually being in the nation's best interest, to force internal free trade. They would have to expend significant political capital to do so.
Lumber prices rose because at the start of the pandemic, the industry predicted a housing crash and took drastic steps to downsize and then the exact opposite happened. And we were left with a garden-variety supply vs demand situation.
If it was just protectionism, prices in Canada would not have had sharply increased lumber prices at the exact same time: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/lumber-prices-covid-19-cost...
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