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Yukon Party hopes to float on territory's rising fortunes

You can't get a bag of cement at a local hardware store in Whitehorse – and heaven help you if you need a landscaper or electrician in a hurry.

Dennis Fentie and his Yukon Party government are counting on voters to remember the territory's last few years of spectacular growth and development on election day.

The Yukon is booming, with road works, housing projects, big-box store construction, mine development and mineral exploration superheating the territorial economy and putting high demands on its manpower and resources.

Grocery stores are having trouble keeping shelves stocked for lack of workers and Help Wanted signs are common on many business doors. Panhandlers have become a rare sight in the territorial capital, even during the summer tourist season, while contractors are working weekends and holidays to keep up with demand.

Housing and rental prices are through the roof, and new home construction has seen hundreds of lots opened up in Whitehorse.

The boom has also been driven by the territory's successful bid to host the Canada Winter Games. The Games – to be held in and around Whitehorse from Feb. 23 to March 10, 2007 – will be the biggest sporting event ever held north of 60.

As they head into the election campaign, Fentie and his conservative government are hoping that their status as the incumbents and the booming economy will give them enough of an edge that voters won't want a change.

But their hopes could be dashed by a number of controversial issues that have dogged the Yukon Party since it ousted the Liberals in the election on Nov. 4, 2002.

The lingering legacy of the 'porn probe'

The Yukon is a small place in many ways, with 33,000 people in an area the size of Germany. That makes the territory's population smaller than Moose Jaw, Sask., or Woodstock, Ont. And three-quarters of those people live in Whitehorse.

Yukon government workers protest so called 'porn probe'.

So when the territorial government announced a month after the 2002 election that an investigation showed civil servants had been using e-mail and the internet to surf for pornography and download it, the news struck close to home – literally – for many people.

The territorial government is the Yukon's largest employer by far and the so-called "porn probe" ended with more than 100 people being suspended or disciplined. Nearly 500 civil servants were implicated in the scandal in some way, including having received e-mails deemed inappropriate by investigators.

The sweeping investigation had great political consequences for the government. In the end, negotiations with the government employees union and Public Service Commission led to disciplinary actions being reduced for dozens of people. Only one man actually lost his job.

But the honeymoon was over early for the ruling Yukon Party. Had an election been held at the time, Fentie's government would likely have been swept from office by the powerful employees union.

Shooting Rudolph

The Yukon Party government also became entangled in a controversy over its handling of a reindeer herd.

Reindeer from the Northern Splendor herd before the slaughter.

The territory struggled for years to develop regulations to manage wildlife and wild meat producers, before Fentie's government introduced a new Wildlife Act in 2004. The act allowed people to raise wild animals but banned the sale of wildlife.

The legislation created a catch-22 situation for Tim and Stella Gregory, who owned the Northern Splendor Reindeer Farm north of Whitehorse. They had a herd of 56 reindeer, but new legislation left them with no way to raise funds to feed them, since they couldn't sell the animals or their meat.

The Gregorys demanded $1 million in compensation from the territorial government or threatened to release the animals to the wild. After much negotiation and public debate, the government agreed to take over the herd in March 2005.

Government biologists then discovered that the animals had Johne's disease, a debilitating and infectious sickness they feared would spread in the wild. In May 2005, the government secretly rounded up the animals and shot them one by one.

But it also shot itself in the foot. The Gregorys and many members of the public were appalled by the move, condemning Fentie's government for what they described as a backhanded and cruel way of dealing with what had started as a problem with bureaucratic red tape. Officials insisted they had no choice but to slaughter the animals to protect wild herds.

In 2006, to mark the anniversary of the slaughter, the Gregorys took out memorial ads in local papers remembering their herd … showing the issue has yet to be forgotten by the public.

Payback time

The issue of government loans has been one of the biggest albatrosses around Fentie's neck through much of the Yukon Party's mandate.

Many Yukon businesses took out low-interest loans from the government in the 1980s and 1990s – but the idea of paying them back was only tentatively acknowledged. Many of the loans built up huge interest while successive Yukon governments did little to try to recover the money.

That changed after the Yukon Party came to power and two of its cabinet ministers, Klondike MLA Peter Jenkins and Porter Creek Centre MLA Archie Lang, were found to hold government loans that totalled almost $250,000, excluding interest.

The opposition seized on the issue and wouldn't let it go. Continually embarrassed by the perception that its own cabinet ministers had so-called "deadbeat" loans, the Fentie government separated itself from the issue by hiring a local company to act as a collection agency. The move led to hundreds of thousands of dollars being returned to public coffers.

Peter Jenkins left the government over the debt repayment issue.

It came at a cost, however. Jenkins, who had been a former leader of the party, left it in the fall of 2005 in a dispute over the payment of his debt. He continued to represent his riding as an Independent and repaid the loan in the spring of 2006. But the defection contributed to the Yukon Party's eventual loss of its majority status.

Fentie's government has taken pride in the way it handled the outstanding debts file – and seems to be hoping the public is similarly satisfied.

First Nations

The Yukon Party government surprised many people with its promise to develop a new, inclusive relationship with the territory's First Nations people.

In 2002, five of the Yukon's 14 First Nations remained without a final land-claims agreement. Since then, the Whitehorse Kwanlin Dun First Nation and the Carcross-Tagish First Nation have both finalized deals.

But three others are outstanding. The White River band from the Beaver Creek area and the Kaska of Watson Lake and Ross River are not even at the table talking to the federal or territorial governments. Some people have blamed Fentie's government for cutting a bilateral deal with the Kaska, effectively doing an end run around Ottawa, to try to get resource development happening in the southeast region.

The move backfired in more ways than one – no development has taken place and the Kaska are no closer to a land-claims deal. Projects such as the proposed Alaska Highway pipeline and the rail link between Alaska and British Columbia could be scuttled by the lack of a final land-claim deal.

As well, the Yukon Party's only aboriginal MLA, John Edzerza, did what he could as minister of education and justice to put First Nation issues at the forefront of the government's agenda. But in the end he gave up. He quit the party on Aug. 3, just weeks before the election call, saying he would continue to sit as an Independent and run for the NDP in the future. The defection came as a double blow to Fentie because it left him without a majority government.

During his time as a cabinet minister, Edzerza dealt with several controversial issues including a new school for Carmacks, a community 120 kilometres north of Whitehorse, a review of the Education Act that stalled about halfway through the process, and the future of the correctional system.

Another controversy between the government and First Nations revolved around efforts to overhaul the Children's Act – which also remains a work in progress.

The economy

Finally, it's not clear how much credit the electorate will give the Yukon Party government for the tens of millions of federal dollars promised to the territory in the past four years.

The previous federal Liberal government cut new deals on health, infrastructure development, gas taxes and economic development with all three northern jurisdictions.

The upcoming Canada Winter Games have also pumped millions of dollars into construction in the Yukon.

The territory has undoubtedly benefited from these developments. However, some people have questioned how much credit lies with Fentie's party, which was formed out of the Yukon Progressive Conservative Party in 1992 as members of the older party tried to distance themselves from the unpopularity of Brian Mulroney's federal Tory government.

Some people feel much of the credit for the recent influx in federal dollars should go to the territory's Liberal MP working with the former Liberal governments.

The territory's booming economy has also stemmed from skyrocketing world metal prices that have driven exploration in the territory to near-record levels. Company expenditures have risen to near $100 million annually, after nearly flatlining in 2000.

The resurgence could give the government a real boost with the electorate. But critics have said it has little to do with the government and much to do with the rise of China and India as global industrial giants with insatiable demands for metals.

The Yukon Party will no doubt try to take as much credit as it can for the good times rolling through the territory. The voters will decide on election day whether that credit is due.

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