Features

The Yukon sport of floor crossing

A Yukoner can understand why outsiders might need a program to track the territory's mercurial political scene. In the past six years alone, politicians changing their party affiliations have triggered the fall of the Liberal government to a Yukon Party whose leader crossed the floor himself just months earlier. They shifted the Official Opposition status from the New Democrats to the Liberals. And they chopped the Yukon Party government from majority to minority.

AUDIO: CBC Yukon's Trisha Estabrooks takes a look at the shifting political landscape. (Runs: 5:16)

Dennis Fentie's Yukon Party vaulted into a majority government in 2002, when then-premier Pat Duncan called a snap election after her Liberals slipped to minority status with a series of defections.

Fentie's party sat firmly in place with 12 seats in the 18-seat legislature. The NDP formed the Official Opposition with five seats, while the Liberals were pounded at the polling station, falling from government to having a lone member in the House: Duncan herself.

Don Roberts was one of three MLAs to leave the governing Liberal party in May 2002.

By the time the legislature was dissolved for this election, however, the Yukon Party government had shrunk to a minority (nine MLAs, including the Speaker), the Liberals formed the Opposition with four seats and the NDP, with three seats, had third-party status. Two MLAs, both former senior cabinet ministers, were sitting as Independents.

"I believe the party system we have is broken, big time," said Don Roberts, who belongs to a group working for electoral reform in the territory. Roberts himself is a former Liberal health minister who left the party while it was still in power in 2002 to sit as an Independent.

Floor crossing, it seems, is a bit of a political sport in the Yukon.

Criminal convictions, outstanding debts

To be fair, politicians in the most recent session pretty much stuck to the parties they were elected under. Until the fall of 2005.

The first change came when Whitehorse MLA Haakon Arntzen quit the governing Yukon Party after being charged with sexually assaulting two teenage girls in the 1970s. He sat as an Independent until resigning his seat in September 2005 after he was convicted of three counts of indecent assault. (The convictions were overturned by the Yukon Court of Appeal on June 16, 2006, and a new trial was ordered.) The riding changed hands upon a byelection, going to new Liberal Leader Arthur Mitchell, who had been defeated by Arntzen in the 2002 general election.

Peter Jenkins swearing in Nov. 30, 2002

In November 2005, Klondike MLA Peter Jenkins quit the ruling Yukon Party, where he had been deputy premier and health minister. Jenkins had been given an ultimatum to pay back an old government loan and left when the party insisted it would take all the necessary steps to recover the money. Jenkins, who paid off his $286,000 debt in March 2006, continued to sit as an Independent.

Still, little changed on the floor of the house, with the government holding a slim majority of 10.

Ideologies fluid as socialists become Tories

Eric Fairclough quit the NDP, later joining the Liberals, in the spring of 2006.

Then, at the end of February 2006, NDP Leader Todd Hardy expelled two caucus members, Kluane MLA Gary McRobb and Mayo-Tatchun MLA Eric Fairclough, for musing publicly about switching their party affiliations.

Citing discontent with Hardy, the two joined the Liberal party, McRobb in March and Fairclough in May.

Fairclough's move gave the Liberals four seats to the New Democrats' three, leaving the NDP with third-party status.

The Yukon Party went from a razor-thin majority to a minority on Aug. 3, just months before the November deadline for the government to call an election.

Citing disatissfaction with the party and premier, John Edzerza left the Yukon Party in August 2006.

McIntyre-Takhini MLA John Edzerza, who was the minister of education and justice, decided to end months of discontent by quitting the cabinet and caucus. He said he would sit as an Independent until the legislature's dissolution, and then seek the nomination for the NDP in his riding.

"You have people crossing the floor from left to the right, the extremes, and those to the middle, whatever that means," said Roberts. "But I don't think it means much anymore."

He noted that three of the Liberals sitting in the last session started out their careers by supporting other parties and that even Fentie, who leads a conservative party, used to be a socialist.

"Maybe the party doesn't mean anything anymore, and maybe it's time to get off the idea that's the way we have to form government," Roberts said.

Small caucuses magnify personality conflicts

He said the problem is that in a small jurisdiction like Yukon, where politics can be much more personal and intimate than in the south, people can chafe at the demands a party or leader make on the individual.

It can also have a lot to do with style. Roberts and two colleagues left the Liberals in 2002 after complaining of heavy-handed leadership by then-premier Pat Duncan.

"Leaders tend to have so much power, they have all the power, and if they forget about why they are there, they tend to use it like a mini-dictators," Roberts said.

"This has happened over and over again, it doesn't seem to matter what government is in place in the Yukon, or across Canada."

Coalition or consensus-style governments urged

That's why Roberts has joined the group working for electoral reform in the Yukon. They are encouraging people to look at other jurisdictions where coalition governments rule, such as some European countries or New Zealand, or the other northern territories in Canada, where consensus-style governments hold sway.

"I don't think it's going to be resolved until we start looking at what I think true representation means," Roberts said. "And right now it's all about power, and it's about how we retain that power.

"And to me the whole objective is to try to represent the people that elect you. And for the last number of years, I have seen that go down the tubes."

Roberts said he has no illusions that the system can be changed overnight. It took many years to develop the party system, and so far the electorate has generally ignored people running as Independents in favour of those representing parties. As well, the territorial government produced a controversial report on electoral reform in 2005 that concluded the public didn't want it.

Still, Roberts said he is holding out hope for change. "If we show them some examples and models elsewhere, Yukoners are a fairly informed electorate."

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