Dear Santa, as you may have read a few weeks ago in the News, our premier said that he was “disappointed” by the federal government’s fall mini-budget. Since our usual Santa appears to be less generous this year, could we write a letter to you as well?
It is quite a serious situation. Our premier was so verklempt he used the word “disappointed” twice in the same press release.
Please don’t hold it against Yukoners that this letter is being written by an economist. I know that you have us in your naughty book. But we really can’t resist talking about budget constraints, even though that concept is completely alien to someone whose business model is based on a limitless supply of toys.
And, just like it was my sister and not me who knocked the tree over that time when we were kids, no one in the Yukon had anything to do with Joel Waldfogel’s paper The Deadweight Loss of Christmas in the American Economic Review.
Anyway, back to writing down everything we want for Christmas.
The premier was disappointed by the “absence of new funding for infrastructure priorities” and lack of investment in “disaster mitigation and emergency preparedness.” The feds are only giving him $1.6 billion this year, so another visit by the Ottawa money plane with infrastructure and disaster money is sorely needed.
So please put more money for that stuff in our stocking. Round it to the nearest hundred million, please, and include a note for Finance so they know what line item in the Public Accounts covers gifts from Santa.
And please don’t give them coal this year. Not only is that not climate friendly, but those new accounting regulations that made them late for their Public Accounts deadline really are very complicated.
Now that we’ve checked the premier off the list, let’s talk about the children.
Please get them lower interest rates on the territorial debt or, if that’s too complicated, just some snow. Enough for Mount Sima to be fun, but not so much that we parents find it annoying to drop them off in the parking lot. And definitely not the kind of snow-plus-freezing-rain you gave Fairbanks a few years ago.
I heard it was fun to skate on your street, but not when frozen trees knocked out the power lines for days.
I haven’t done any public consultations, but I’m pretty sure everyone here would be thrilled if you brought us a new department of Health and Social Services. The old one we have is broken.
Somehow the money plane brings us $1.6 billion from Ottawa every year, and the department can’t find money to keep the community nursing stations open.
Even a little bit would help. Especially a family doctor for the Yukoners who don’t have one. There were 3,840 Yukoners in that situation in March, and even Google can’t seem to tell me how many there are now. Also, especially, an open nursing centre for each Yukon community. And also, especially, the 200 Yukoners on the hip replacement waiting list, which can take more than two Christmases to get to the top of.
We would also like to ask for a new hydro dam. We really wanted one in Atlin, but it turned out to be $310 million. Your sleigh is magical, so feel free to leave a little something special under the tree at YESAB and just put the dam on any river Rudolph thinks looks good.
If a dam is too big even for your sleigh, $310 million in $100 bills will fit in just 150 duffle bags. Please put these in Finance beside their tree.
We can’t forget the City of Whitehorse. Some geothermally heated sidewalks like in Sweden would be awesome.
They are also having trouble getting the Yukon government to fulfill its promise to provide free busing. So maybe if you got them a monorail it would solve that whole problem. I suggest one monorail that goes around the Hamilton Boulevard-South Access-Second Avenue loop, and a second one that goes from Riverdale to Crestview via Whistlebend and Porter Creek.
And like Cousin Eddie in Christmas Vacation, I would like you to get yourself something nice too. Perhaps a subscription to the News? Your North Pole operations are undoubtedly in a tax-efficient Arctic offshore holding company, so the new federal Digital News Subscription Tax Credit won’t do you much good. But at least you’ll know in advance what we are going to ask for next year.
We left some Yukon cranberries by the tree for the reindeer and some Air North cookies for you. Safe travels this Christmas. We’ll be watching for you on the NORAD Santa radar website.
Merry Christmas.
PS - When you land on Finance to drop off the cash, please ask Rudolph not to put a hoof through the solar panels. They were a gift from Ottawa last year.
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.