New party leaders and a pandemic: Yukon's political landscape now far different from 2016

Life comes at you fast.

In the 2016 territorial election, Sandy Silver was the young, freewheeling third party leader with nothing to lose. The incumbent Yukon Party, in its third term in power, had alienated large segments of the electorate and Darrell Pasloski's government was running out of gas.

Parties that have been in power for three terms and 14 years typically do not enjoy a high re-election rate. The NDP, though the Official Opposition heading to the 2016 campaign, had seemingly reached its ceiling under former leader Liz Hanson.

Silver's Liberals cruised to a convincing win, taking 11 of 19 seats, though it was far from a landslide. The Liberals captured 39 per cent of the vote to the Yukon Party's 33.

Fast forward to now, and the Yukon's political landscape looks a little different. Pasloski stepped down as Yukon Party leader after losing his Mountainview seat, and later decamped for the greener pastures of corporate boards and lobbying firms.

Hanson would later step down as NDP leader, giving way to Kate White, the only other New Democrat MLA to keep her seat after the party's 2016 drubbing.

With 34-year-old Currie Dixon's election as leader over the weekend, the Yukon Party now sports the kind of fresh face it hasn't had in a while. Still, as a former cabinet minister and director of the party's 2016 campaign, Dixon is far from a neophyte.

Suddenly Silver's the old guard

But all of a sudden, Silver finds himself the oldest party leader and his government under concerted fire from both the left and the right.

The Liberals have not taken criticism well, even before being handed the unenviable task of managing the government's response to COVID-19. In Question Period they were fond of blaming whatever problem on the Yukon Party, or, failing that, emitting an ink cloud of non-answers.

The pandemic, at least at first, bought the Liberals some good will from the opposition parties. Clearly, such an unprecedented public emergency was going to disrupt business as usual. The Yukon Party and NDP agreed to let the spring budget pass the house without the usual debate.

Ever since, the three parties have been locked in a dispute over how to give the budget some after-the-fact scrutiny. The government pulled the plug on budget hearings planned for May. A push for a house committee to examine some of the orders-in-council the government passed to deal with the pandemic has gone nowhere.

The crisis brought some consensus: the opposition parties have remained largely silent on many of the economic measures the government has brought forward. Some of those measures, such as wage and rent subsidies, are more traditionally the domain of the NDP.

The Liberals also tacked left on the environment, stealing the NDP's thunder on climate change and tabling an ambitious package of reforms aimed at cutting the Yukon's carbon emissions.

Liberals face fire from both sides

Thanks to Ottawa's longstanding, generous fiscal patronage of the territorial governments, the Yukon Party, when it was in power, was largely able to avoid the harsh austerity that other right-of-centre governments have adopted, either by choice or necessity. (Although the Liberals have a point when they note that it was the Yukon Party that drew heavily on the territory's financial assets to maintain balanced budgets.)

Dixon spent much of his leadership campaign talking about the need for the Yukon Party to attract new supporters by taking issues like mental health and early childhood education — not exactly conservative meat-and-potatoes stuff — more seriously.

Back in 2016, Silver expertly wielded his party's location in the political centre, pledging to adopt ideas from the left or the right, without concern for ideology.

But power is an ideology of its own and retaining it tends to become the primary focus for most governments.

By the time the next election rolls around, no more than a year and a half from now, Silver may find himself squeezed from both sides. Residing in the political centre may not be quite the sweet spot it once was.