MLA Katrina Nokleby says she regrets ever leaving Yellowknife evacuation zone

Great Slave MLA Katrina Nokleby says she's surprised and disappointed by the integrity commissioner's decision that said she showed poor judgment by returning to Yellowknife during the wildfire evacuation.

In an interview with The Trailbreaker host Hilary Bird, Nokleby said she regrets leaving during the initial evacuation and part of the reason she stayed after being told to leave a second time was due to depression.

Integrity Commission David Phillip Jones said in a report issued Tuesday that Nokleby should be fined and reprimanded and he might have also recommended suspension if an election wasn't imminent. MLAs planned to discuss those recommendations Friday. 

Jones's investigation was launched following two complaints he received in late August just after Nokleby returned to the capital, which was about a week after an evacuation order came into effect for the city.

Nokleby returned to Yellowknife on Aug. 25, claiming to have been designated an "essential" worker.

Here is a transcript of Nokleby's interview with Bird on The Trailbreaker, lightly edited for clarity.

What do you make of this report?

I mean, I respect the decision of the commissioner. I was surprised. I thought I had done a good job of explaining my circumstances around things. Disappointed, you know, unfortunate how things played out. But I don't think that, you know, it can be discounted, the politics that have also been at play here and the last four years.

Why did you come back?

So many reasons. I was in Behchokǫ̀, I was watching the fire maps, I was receiving information from the department, and to me there did not appear to be a fire out of control 15 kilometres from the city. That is what I saw, and I had people on the inside, in Yellowknife, telling me this, that there was not a sense of urgency, Iike I said, and I regret that was my first comment out of my mouth, but I was directly asked 'what is the mood in Yellowknife?' And that was the answer I gave. 'There's not a sense of urgency.' And there wasn't.

I watched people riding around in the fire trucks, pulling up to the department or to the grocery store to get their pop and chips to go over to a barbecue, and I understand how flippant my responses sounded. However, I think I was in shock when I got back, and one of the reasons [is] I really felt I needed to come back and ascertain for myself, and I did want to help my constituents. I had people that were worried about their pets and fish and plants and gardens and all of that. Plus I've just always been a huge volunteer in our community, and I have a skill set that I thought was useful.

And so when I was was told this is a process that you can go through, and I saw numerous other people here helping out, giving back and talking about being separated from their families, which I don't have, and meanwhile I'm sitting in Behchokǫ̀, I am draining resources in Behchokǫ̀, I'm on MLA [Jane] Weyallon Armstrong's couch, I have four cats with me.

Two are rescues from a constituent, and I get that that's been really played up and made fun of, but when I hit Behchokǫ̀ that night, or, sorry, North Arm Park, something stopped me from going further, and I think it was just a self-preservation for my own safety as I'd almost driven off the road like six times. I was so exhausted when I left Thursday evening.

Got to North Arm Park. At this point I had a bunch of messes to clean up in the back, in my truck. And so I just thought you know what, I'm going I'm not going to push on like I would normally do, and I pulled over and I fell asleep. And when I came to that point in the morning, MLA Weyallon Armstrong messaged me and she asked me if I'm still at the park, and she said 'Before you go any further, come and have breakfast in Behchokǫ̀.'

So I came back, and that's when she invited me to stay, and I'm grateful that I was there. We were able to help each other, we were able to support each other. I was able to see the situation first hand in Behchokǫ̀. I was able to advocate for people from there. So rather than spending another two days getting, and I was already aware of how bad the situation was in Alberta, and that was another reason — I'm kind of sidetracking myself — but it was another reason I returned, was the reports I was getting in the south, coupled with this picture that was being painted for me, plus my background in science where I can tell that the fire reports coming out of [communications] had things like 'the calm before the storm,' and 'the wind will be this,' and I did years of air monitoring at Giant Mine. You never write a weather report or forecast in a definitive tense. There's ways that you report on weather and you don't say this will happen because you're not God or you're not the Creator. You can't tell everybody what's going to happen.

And so I found that the messaging was getting more and more inflammatory, but it wasn't making any sense with what I was seeing in the NASA imagery, which was showing the fire retreating to the west, away from town. But meanwhile, the first line in all the fire reports is 'the fire is out of control.' But yet, meanwhile it hadn't moved for a week from 15 kilometres. So none of this was jiving for me. And people are like, 'Oh, you're not a fire expert.'

What do you say to those people who say you're not a fire expert, that those are the experts who are who are making those claims?

I never heard from those experts, that is not an expert making that claim. That was a comms person preparing that report, and every time I have asked the department to speak to the fire people, we are told we were only allowed to speak to departmental officials or the comms people. So then, when I'm sitting outside of town, I'm wasting resources. I'm watching Behchokǫ̀ not be able to get food, the elders home worried about feeding the elders and all of this. And I'm hearing what's happening in town, and that the works that are being done are, you know, subdivision clearing, walking trails, filling the potholes.

And then, meanwhile, I'm hearing about our citizens that have been just dispersed, our vulnerable population across the south, vulnerable Indigenous young women sent to Winnipeg, the missing and murdered capital of Canada for Indigenous and women and girls.

But what were you going to do here about all that? Why was it so important for you to come back here?

Well, first of all, I just, I needed to have a place in a space where I felt like I could be effective, and sleeping on someone's couch for weeks on end is not going to do that. To me, I didn't see any difference in me physically being in Behchokǫ̀ than physically being in Yellowknife. And I do understand that, yes, I could have gone south. At that point, the road between here and Enterprise and all of that was becoming very unstable. And at just that point, my mental health and exhaustion. I was like, I just want to go back. I need to know for myself what is going on, because next week or in a couple weeks they're asking us to postpone elections at this point. As I'm evacuating, I'm being pressured to make decisions about the election, and I knew that we were coming in to be, we were going to be asked to approve almost $100 million, but that was even not even going to be what this part of it all was. That was just the stuff that had been spent to date.

And I felt like as an engineer, as a leader, as somebody who's responsible to the fiscal well-being and the mental and physical well-being of our people, that I needed to see this for myself. Plus I knew I had assets and things to offer. People are like, 'you have no skills.' I'm a geological engineer.

But even the integrity commissioner found ...

Yeah, but that wasn't my my reason, and regardless of whether, you know, people agree, and honestly, it wasn't even my intent today to come and talk about why I came. I accept that I came. I accept with the integrity commissioner said. I owned it. It was just, it is what it is, and it is what happened. And I'm OK with that.

We spoke about why you came in, but why didn't you leave when you were told? When you got that call from from Dettah Chief Ernest Betsina, just saying, we can't keep you as an essential worker anymore? Why didn't you leave at that point?

Because I did try to find some other area in which I could be useful, and I had been agreed upon to, actually someone was willing to help or to take me to help them with logistics, because I have a background with the winter road and dispatch and all of that. And then when that person went back to talk to others, the politics again intervened and that offer was rescinded.

You told the commissioner that you didn't leave because you were in an emotional tailspin.

I have been vocal my entire term that I struggle with depression and anxiety. After the first attempt to remove me from office and my mother's death in 2020, I had to go on medication to deal with the stress of the job, then being removed afterwards, I fell into depression and I stayed on my couch. I showered, I think, onc. My friend bought me groceries. Every time a car drove by my house, I was looking to see who it was. The media was already asking me if I had left because I'd moved my vehicle. So I knew my house was being watched and it all sounds ...

This was after the media reports that you would come back.

Yeah, and the hate mail that I received. I had constituents rightfully reach out, tell me they were not happy with me, and I responded to them. What can I say? I could not physically get up and force myself to pack four cats and myself and the, my mom's, you know, heirlooms and things that I wanted to keep back into my truck and drive 14 hours away.

And honestly, I almost quit the day of the virtual session ... that's how done I was, and the only reason I didn't was, at that time, was the people that have supported me, and not letting them down.

So I didn't leave again. And that's the part I acknowledged. But when I came in, I believed I was coming in the way that the minister had told me to do so. He did not indicate to me to not do that. He told me go and find somebody that will take you to volunteer. And that is what I did. And to me, I felt an obligation and a responsibility to come back and help and see for myself what was going on so that the people in the south had the truth, because they were suffering and they were asking me.

I want to talk to you about the emotional because you talk about how difficult it was emotionally for you to leave. I mean, many people had a very difficult emotional time during the evacuation and yet still left. What do you say to people who left when ...

I left when we were all told to leave. I did leave. And that was my sin. If I hadn't have left, none of this would be happening. But I left and I came back, and never wanted to leave ...

And stayed.

Yeah, and stayed. And again, we can belabour that point, but I have never denied that. And I have a reason for it, and it's not an excuse but if you want to know why I stayed, this is why I stayed. I have dealt with depression since I was probably 13 years old if not younger. And I am who I am.

And if I didn't have the empathy and the concern and care that I have for these people I wouldn't deal with depression. But this job depresses the — and now I want to swear — out of me. There's vicarious trauma. I have extreme PTSD from my first year. And I listen, and I hear story after story after story, and then I look over and I see people that just don't appear to care.

Do you have any regrets?

Yes. Yeah.

What do you regret?

I mean, I guess part of me regrets coming back in the first place. Actually start at the beginning — I regret leaving. I wish I'd listened to my gut and I had stayed, because I knew I could help, and when I saw how that was played out for others, you know this would have been avoided. Maybe. I mean, people like to attack me no matter what, so we'll leave that there.

But hindsight's 20/20, so I can't say, like, yes, definitively, I wish I'd left again. I wish I hadn't had faith in what the chief was telling me. That's a regret. I regret not going on the first day and being down in Alberta, like to begin with, so it wouldn't have been a point or it wouldn't ever have arisen."

Has this had an impact on whether or not you'll run again?

It made me for the first time, consider not running. Yeah.

Will you run again?

Yeah, I will run again. My mom once said to me, you know, 'don't take criticism from people you wouldn't take advice from.' And and I really feel that way about about some of what's gone on.