'No one voted for this:' Unpacking the Yukon's renewed Liberal-NDP alliance

Like it or not, Ranj Pillai really had no other choice.

Faced with the prospect of calling a winter election after mere weeks as the Yukon's new premier, or trying to survive confidence votes in the legislature with just eight out of 19 seats, the Liberal leader made the unavoidable call: another deal with the NDP.

Under the previous Confidence and Supply Agreement (CASA), the NDP extracted some procedural guarantees, plus some key policy changes: more aggressive action on climate change, a cap on rent increases and more frontline health and education services.

NDP Leader Kate White was clearly willing to squeeze the Liberals for even more this time around. The 2023 edition of CASA contains 33 individual items.

Some of them will largely be uncontroversial: more money to First Nations for land-based healing is a no-brainer. 

Others are well-intentioned, but there are questions about how attainable they are. Hiring more nurses to support more detox beds is a great idea, but where are those nurses going to come from? Every jurisdiction in Canada is scouring the globe for more nurses to help shore up collapsing health care systems.

Then there are the promises nobody even asked for. The City of Whitehorse says it was not consulted by either the NDP or the Liberals on free public transit. The city is already reviewing its transit service with an eye to expansion. Mayor Laura Cabott rightly points out there's actually a lot of evidence that free transit does more harm than good.

That might seem counterintuitive, but the biggest complaint from transit riders isn't the cost (no matter how you slice it, $2.50 for a ride across town is a bargain), it's milk-run routes that run too infrequently to be convenient. 

"There are some studies that show [free transit] doesn't necessarily increase ridership," Cabott told Radio-Canada this week. "When you think about it, if you can afford to drive a car, you're probably able to afford to ride the bus. But you choose your car over the bus, typically because of convenience."

It would be relatively simple for the city to hand out free transit passes to those who genuinely can't afford them, and put that extra money toward more frequent service and badly needed infrastructure, such as shelters and bus stop markers that aren't just no-parking signs. 

Also, transit fares cover roughly a quarter of the $6-million annual cost of transit services, some $1.5 million per year. What happens if a future government decides to whack that territorial funding in the future, and leave the city in the lurch? 

Finally, prepare for a scrap over housing. Banning no-cause evictions will be particularly popular among renters. But the 5 per cent cap on rental increases is already drawing howls of outrage from the Yukon Residential Landlords Association. 

President Lars Hartling, who is presently offering a modest one-bedroom apartment for rent on Facebook for $1,750 per month, went so far as to demand an election on this topic alone. 

"There was no mandate to do this and our organization is shocked that we're at this point," he said this week.

Hartling and Yukon Party Leader Currie Dixon both ominously warned these policies will scare off private-sector investment in housing. But rents in Whitehorse are still skyrocketing and the vacancy rate is 1.9 per cent. That seller's market hasn't done much to spur new rental construction. 

Meanwhile, Dixon has done everything short of waving his arms and making chicken sounds to try to goad Pillai into calling an election. This is largely because the Yukon Party is in possession of at least one poll that suggests they have a 15-point lead on the second-place NDP, with the Liberals a distant third.

"This is not what Yukoners voted for," Dixon said this week. "No one elected this premier. No one voted for this agenda. There's no mandate for any of this."

Strictly speaking, that's true. But parliamentary pedants will remind you that Canadian voters don't elect governments, they elect MLAs or MPs who form governments. 

In the last election, the Yukon Party did win the most votes. But were it not for a literal random draw, the Liberals would have an outright plurality in the house. 

The Liberals did themselves no favours by having an uncontested snooze-fest of a leadership race to replace Sandy Silver. Pillai (or the backroom operators advising him) did himself no favours by refusing to speak in public for more than a week after his coronation as Liberal leader.

But Pillai is well within parliamentary norms in trying to hold together a government in the unwieldy pizza parliament Yukoners elected. 

In short, none of the three parties has a mandate to do anything, but somebody has to do something.