The scarcest thing a political leader has is time. This means both hours in the day and days left to make a difference before the next election.
The time pressure is amplified for Yukon premiers because they must manage a provincial suite of issues with the bench strength of a territory. Their cabinets are smaller and tend to be less politically experienced. The small cadre of top officials that a Yukon premier relies on to get things done is always spread thin.
Which is why you generally don’t read about Yukon premiers in publications such as Nikkei Asia, Japan’s premier English-language politics and business weekly. Other than dealing with the Alaskans on cross-border infrastructure, salmon or caribou, Yukon premiers are usually too focused on minding the trapline at home to make a splash internationally.
Premier Ranj Pillai is taking a different approach. A Dec. 28 article by Nikkei Asia’s diplomatic correspondent included an interview with the premier, in which he described the creation of a new Yukon Arctic Security Advisory Council (YASAC). The council will “discuss ways to secure and defend infrastructure, energy resources, critical minerals, airports and digital networks, as well as how to increase the presence of the Canadian Armed Forces in the Yukon.”
As reported in the News, the premier announced last week that YASAC would be composed of five Yukon University and Outside experts and would write a report later in 2024. It will cost around $100,000.
Pillai has also been investing time in international relationships. Nikkei Asia reported that Alaska Governor Dunleavy will be visiting the Yukon in February, and the premier travelled widely in 2023 to places such as India and Great Britain.
He was in India on the night Prime Minister Trudeau made his shocking allegations about Indian involvement in the assassination of a Sikh leader in BC. Federal diplomats did not warn the premier in advance, prompting him — as reported in the News — to demand classified briefings and changes to the CSIS Act to enable better intelligence sharing with the Yukon.
Deciding how much time to put into international affairs is difficult. On the one hand, these issues are obviously important. Chinese and Russian military vessels and aircraft do patrol off the Yukon and Alaska coasts, as the premier described to Nikkei Asia. We, along with the rest of Canada, are the targets of state-sponsored cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns on social media. State-owned mining companies are interested in our minerals and don’t necessarily have our interests in mind, as anyone familiar with the Wolverine mine clean-up will know. International investors, mining companies and immigrants are key to the Yukon economy.
On the other hand, will time invested by a Yukon premier make any practical impact? Will China or Russia change their behaviour, or will the Canadian or U.S. governments step up further?
The question is especially tough for a Yukon politician. One can see how the Pentagon would take a call from the Alaska governor or Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski seriously. Murkowski sits on the highly influential Senate appropriations committee, as well as the sub-committee on military construction.
But who is the Yukon premier supposed to call? The people in Ottawa who have persistently not met Canada’s NATO military-funding commitment and almost completely outsourced our defense to the United States? The list of things we don’t do is long. No full-time air base North of 60. Not even a full-time Search-and-Rescue air base. The Nanisivik naval station has been repeatedly delayed and downgraded. When it opens in 2025 it is expected to be used four weeks per year mostly as a refueling stop. No equivalent even of this exists in the Western Arctic. No Arctic-capable submarines. Limited drone or human-piloted Arctic surveillance aircraft.
Take the Canadian navy as an example. Its commander, Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee, recently posted a sobering YouTube update saying the fleet was in a “critical state.” He pointed out that “our West Coast fleet is beset with a shortage of qualified techs constraining our ability to maintain and operate our ships.” With shortages of up to 40 per cent of staff in key roles, the navy is struggling to keep enough frigates operational to meet Canada’s commitments. This means it can only keep one of the new DeWolf class of Arctic and offshore patrol vessels at sea at a given moment.
No matter who the Yukon premier phones, it is unlikely the Canadian navy will be spending much time around Herschel Island any time soon.
You could argue that the Yukon premier’s time might be better spent solving diplomatic tangles closer to home, such as the five-way imbroglio between the Yukon, the feds, British Columbia, Carcross-Tagish First Nation and Taku River Tlingit First Nation that is holding up important transboundary power lines.
More prosaically, the $100,000 cost of YASAC would pay for an additional nurse at the hospital. The Yukon government’s executive council office already has an Intergovernmental Relations branch. Getting them a subscription to The Economist would cost just $235.
Then there is the question of whether the Yukon should be lobbying the feds to do their job on defense, or figuring out how we can contribute. It is easy to ask Ottawa for more briefings, more visits by the air force and more funding for Arctic patrol drones. But the Yukon government should also ask itself how it can best contribute to Canada and our allies.
The premier’s biggest contribution to Canada and our allies might be accelerating approvals of critical-mineral mines, building up a local private sector to reduce how much we drain from the federal treasury, or encouraging Yukon indigenous and non-indigenous youth to take up Vice-Admiral Topshee on his new all-expenses-paid “naval experience program.”
And it would be better to make these contributions before someone in Ottawa notices that transferring $1.4 billion or $31,000 per person to the Yukon government is a bit rich, and starts to think that maybe some of it should be redirected to Arctic defense.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist, author of the Aurore of the Yukon youth adventure novels and co-host of the Klondike Gold Rush History podcast. He won the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist.