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.”
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).
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 — Pemberton’s Liberals, Currie Dixon’s Yukon Party or Kate White’s NDP — have announced a full slate of candidates. The nomination deadline is 10 days into the campaign.
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.
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.
