The Whitehorse mayoral race is a joke and we're all doomed

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With municipal elections fast approaching, the Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce hosted a forum for the city's three mayoral candidates on Oct 13. Watching it, you could safely draw a single, important conclusion: 

The Whitehorse race for mayor is a joke and we're all doomed. 

There's little substantial difference between the candidates, all of whom are upper-class settlers whose platforms are clearly geared to their own demographic. As a working-class progressive voter who cares about renters' rights, action on climate change and social justice — not to mention my work as a long-time municipal and territorial politics reporter and commentator — there's no one running I can bring myself to vote for on Oct. 21. I may have to scratch my ballot. 

Here's why.

Campaigning on a platform which included alleviating the housing crisis and climate change, Laura Cabott had almost no action-oriented solutions outside of "start a committee." Who she wants to solve the housing crisis for, however, is obvious: people who can afford to buy. Neither Cabott nor any other candidate ever even used the word rent. 

Cabott's stated support for a beefed up SCAN Act — currently being challenged in Yukon's Supreme Court by multiple anti-poverty groups who say it targets the homeless — is problematic, if only because it's a right-wing dog whistle; Cabott is a lawyer and must know that power over the act falls to the territory, not the city.

Her attitude toward those living in poverty, especially those with addictions, however, is an even bigger issue: she claims the emergency shelter "has become a magnet for career criminals" and said she would support a "low-barrier" facility (meaning one that allows people consuming alcohol or other intoxicants to access the space, as the shelter does now) "somewhere else" in the city. 

Translation: these people make me uncomfortable and inconvenience me and I don't want to see them.

During the forum, all three candidates made the same telling mistake: whenever the subject of crime, specifically the increase in break-ins, came up, they immediately began talking about the homeless population and substance abuse, which implies the cause of said crime is that population — a conflation that is both reprehensible and irresponsible. 

Citing an overdose and several police and ambulance visits she observed downtown, Patti Balsillie said people who live in the area and "pay taxes" and substance users had "diametrically different" concerns — apparently assuming those two groups do not overlap while failing to understand an overdose is not a crime or inconvenience to homeowners, but a tragedy.  

When discussing the shelter specifically, Balsillie said the only real problem with it is that it's wet, and that people such as those just coming out of jail or rehabilitation services are placed there: basically, these unclean alcoholics and addicts are mucking up the place for "clean and sober" (read: decent) people. 

Later, she claimed the RCMP spend "60 per cent" of their resources on calls to the shelter, and that before the shelter became government run and wet in 2019, there were "no overdoses, stabbings, rapes and fights" associated with the place. Balsillie ignores the fact that the Salvation Army had its contract pulled because they were failing to deliver essential services to the homeless population in the first place.

The RCMP could not confirm Balsillie's statistics by press time, but even if the numbers she gave are correct, she failed to ask the most important question: why are they up? A worsening opioid crisis coupled with a global pandemic, a housing crisis, economic disparity and a near-total failure to deliver social and addictions services seems like a clearer picture than Balsillie's reductionist and frankly discriminatory thinking.

With three terms on council under his belt, Samson Hartland is by far the most experienced — and careful — of all the candidates. He knows that to win, he needs to come off much more centre-leaning than he is in practice. You can see him serving two masters in his opening statement: he makes a land acknowledgement after the forum host has already made one, only to refer to the Yukon as a "frontier" seconds after, a subtle hat-tip to his right-wing base, which support the old-boy settler-colonial values such a word implies. He went on to say he wanted to "make the city greater together," an eerie echo of Trumpist rhetoric. 

Hartland continued this game throughout the forum: on the surface, he approached the issue of crime with a lighter hand than his colleagues, even as he said that bylaw officers should be able to interact more with the RCMP, but that they couldn't intervene in crimes as they occurred because they aren't armed — the implication being the "criminals" are dangerous, signalling his support both for the RCMP, property owners and businesses who would like to see the downtown "cleaned up" of the homeless population all three candidates imply are a threatening criminal element.

Bafflingly, he also talked a lot about climate change and what the city had done to go green — conveniently ignoring the fact that when the city passed a motion declaring a climate emergency in September 2019, Hartland, who was then still the executive director of the Yukon Chamber of Mines, was the only councillor who voted against it. 

It's not that Hartland is any more progressive than his colleagues; it's just that he knows better how to hold his hand and play his cards.