Craft·2026-04-01·5 min
Why cedar.
The short version of why the catalogue is Western Red Cedar, not pressure-treated pine.
NorthStar
/Company
The short version of why the catalogue is Western Red Cedar, not pressure-treated pine.
Most wood fence in Canada is pressure-treated pine shipped up from the southern United States. It’s cheap, and if you’re putting up a line for a rental property it’s probably the right call. For everything else, it’s worth a longer look at Western Red Cedar.
Cedar is naturally rot-resistant, doesn’t need a chemical treatment to survive exposure, and holds its dimensional stability through freeze-thaw cycles better than most species you can buy. It’s softer than oak or ash so you can cut it with regular carpentry tools, but it’s harder than pine and holds fasteners better. It ages to a soft silver-grey in one season and stays that way for decades.
There’s one other thing: cedar is Canadian. The Western Red Cedar we mill comes from Canadian forests. For a company that’s 100% Canadian owned and operated, it’s the honest default.
That’s why eleven of our twelve products are cedar. The one exception is the Good Neighbour Pressure-treated — same shadowbox geometry as our cedar panel, in ACQ-treated pine, for the jobs where price matters more than species.