Yukon’s territorial election campaign will officially begin on Friday.
Premier Mike Pemberton says he’ll ask Yukon Commissioner Adeline Webber on Friday to dissolve the legislative assembly and set the territorial election for Nov. 3. Pemberton made the announcement in Carcross on Thursday, alongside a handful of Liberal candidates.
Pemberton’s Liberals are seeking a third mandate with an almost entirely new roster of candidates this time. All but one of the party’s sitting MLAs decided not to run again. It’s also Pemberton’s first campaign after taking over as party leader earlier this year.
Pemberton said his party wanted to announce the election in Carcross to demonstrate a commitment to rural issues.
“We wanted to begin in a community,” he said. “Carcross felt like the right place to do that, because at its heart, this election is about connection, relationships and the home we all share.”
Pemberton said the Liberals are running on a platform of housing, accessible health care, affordability, the economy and reconciliation.
Health care cited as an issue by all parties
“Now I want to say this clearly: housing is our top priority,” Pemberton said.
The other parties also sought to define the focus of their upcoming campaign on Thursday, with NDP Leader Kate White saying the election “is about health care,” while Yukon Party Leader Currie Dixon said he’s running under the banner of “change.”
“We’re super excited,” said Dixon on Thursday afternoon, after Pemberton’s announcement.
In 2021, The Yukon Party fell just short of toppling the Liberals, winning the same number of seats as the governing party. The Liberals would then end up striking a deal with White’s NDP to stay in power for another term. Dixon’s been hankering for another election since then.
“This means that we’re finally in a position to offer Yukoners the change that we know so many Yukoners are after,” he said on Thursday.
He cited housing, the economy, land development, health care and crime as key issues.
“The last four years have been a combination of Liberal and NDP government, and the Yukon Party is uniquely positioned to offer Yukoners a true change,” he said.
White, meanwhile, also took aim at the two other parties who she said “have spent years making health care worse.” Before the Liberals formed government in 2016, the Yukon Party had been in power for 14 years. Yukon’s last NDP government was voted out in 2000.
White spoke of burnout among health workers, the long wait list for a family doctor, and frequent closures of rural health centres because of staff shortages.
“On every doorstep in every community, Yukoners are sharing their story with us,” she said at a campaign launch event on Thursday.
“Make no mistake — health care is a political decision, and Yukoners are paying the price for the other parties’ bad decisions.”
New electoral districts
This will be the first election since some of the territory’s electoral districts were redrawn last year to account for population growth.
The next legislative assembly will have two more members, representing the new Whitehorse ridings of Whistle Bend North and Whistle Bend South. The two ridings were adopted in late 2024, and will boost the number of seats in the next assembly from 19 to 21.
A few other electoral districts have changed this time. The Pelly-Nisutlin district was dissolved, with the communities of Ross River and Faro now part of a district that includes Watson Lake, and the community of Teslin now part of the Southern Lakes riding.
The former Mount Lorne-Southern Lakes district is divided between two other districts: Southern Lakes, which includes Carcross and Tagish as well as Teslin, and Marsh Lake-Mount Lorne-Golden Horn (which removes Golden Horn from the Copperbelt South district).
Yukon’s current cabinet ministers not seeking re-election
Friday is the latest date Pemberton could call the election, which must be held on or before Nov. 3. He said he waited until the last minute because his party needed the maximum amount of time to get ready.
“The time we took was to build this team,” he said.
None of Yukon’s seven Liberal cabinet ministers are running for re-election, and the only incumbent Liberal who’s running is Jeremy Harper, MLA for Mayo-Tatchun, who served as Speaker during the last sitting.
Former Liberal premiers Sandy Silver and Ranj Pillai both announced their plans to bow out of territorial politics when they resigned from party leadership — Silver in 2023, and Pillai earlier this year.
Liberal ministers Richard Mostyn, Nils Clarke, Jeanie McLean, John Streicker and Tracy-Anne McPhee all announced over the summer that they would not seek re-election.
The Yukon has had three Liberal premiers since the last election in 2021. Sandy Silver passed the baton to Ranj Pillai in January 2023 after a seven-year term as premier, and Pillai spent two years at the helm and stepped down last spring.
Pemberton, former party vice-president and first-time political candidate, won the Liberal leadership race in June.
None of the three major parties — the only ones registered in this campaign, according to Elections Yukon — have yet announced a full slate of candidates. The nomination deadline is 10 days into the campaign.
4-year minority government propped up by CASA
Since 2021, the Liberals have held a minority government buoyed by its Confidence and Supply Agreement (CASA) with the Yukon NDP. The Liberals had eight seats in the legislature, the Yukon Party had eight seats, and the Yukon NDP had three.
CASA was signed in 2021 and then renewed in 2023. It made several demands of the government in exchange for NDP support in the legislature.
Under that agreement, the government introduced dental care, a walk-in clinic, a revised Yukon Residential Tenancies Act, and paid sick leave, and established a special committee on electoral reform.
The deal also led to the establishment of a rent cap, which reportedly led to a surge of no-cause evictions from landlords trying to skirt it. The government banned no-cause evictions afterwards.
The Yukon Party has said it will consider reversing the rent cap and ban on no-cause evictions.
Vote on electoral reform also Nov. 3
Voters will get a second ballot on polling day. Elections Yukon is conducting a plebiscite on electoral reform to gauge support for switching to a ranked ballot system and throwing away the current first-past-the-post system.
Ranked ballot systems essentially require candidates to receive at least 50 per cent of the vote. If nobody wins by that metric, voters’ second and third choices will be used to determine the winner.
The ranked ballot system was recommended by the citizen’s assembly on electoral reform last year.
More information about the plebiscite is posted online.
