Yellowknife's mayor on community meeting, plans for upcoming wildfire season

The City of Yellowknife held a public engagement meeting Wednesday night, giving people a chance to share their thoughts on the response to last year's wildfires. 

The city has hired a third-party contractor, KPMG Canada, to conduct a review of the city's response to last year's wildfires and the full evacuation of Yellowknife. 

About 200 people attended the session last night, discussing everything from the need for better communication, to more co-ordination between the city and the territorial government, and how volunteers can work more effectively with government and the contractors. 

Yellowknife Mayor Rebecca Alty attended last night's meeting. She spoke with Trailbreaker host Hilary Bird. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

We heard at the meeting that local residents had lost trust in local governments, including the City of Yellowknife. What was it like to hear that? 

It's not a new message. I've heard that from residents. I've heard kudos, thanks, really appreciate it. You've got the whole spectrum — from the "evacu-vacation" all the way to, "this was awful and the worst time of my life."

Building trust is one step at a time, one day at a time, and part of this review is about building the trust and finding ways to improve [for] the next time. Trust doesn't get regained in a day. 

Council already put money in this year's budget to start implementing recommendations from the after-action assessment when it comes. We've got money in the budget for an emergency manager. So, really enhancing what we're doing as a city in regard to emergency preparedness. 

There were people there who said they had felt sort of blind-sided by the evacuation. We had heard repeatedly that the main plan was to shelter in place, namely at the Multiplex.  Can you help people understand how we went from that to an evacuation last summer, so quickly? 

The emergency plan and evacuation has a number of steps. Sheltering in place is one. The Multiplex, it's not a plan to house all 20,000 residents there. It's about if the west side of our community, Kam Lake, was under threat, then the Multiplex would be open to them. 

You know, we're Yellowknifers, you might go stay with your friends and family, you might go check into the Explorer, or you might go stay at the Multiplex. And if situations change, that's where it escalates up to where you might need the full community evacuation. That's where, under the N.W.T. emergency plan, communities look to the subject-matter experts at the territorial government for guidance on those escalations.

I definitely appreciate that residents felt that it happened quickly. And it did happen quickly, the situation changed a lot. So that's where we're working with the territorial government, to be able to communicate triggers and the evacuation steps of sheltering in place all the way up to full community evacuation better. 

It did kind of seem like evacuation was never going to happen, that it was never in the plan. 

I heard from residents last night that the city should have stuck to the plan of sheltering in the community, and others were like, we should have evacuated earlier because of the smoke. The main thing is to listen to those subject-matter experts, but then be able to break down that information to be plain language, the high level summary.

We heard last night that people want a plan, that if it does get, say 13 kilometres or 16 kilometres from the city, this is what's going to happen. That clear language plan, is that something that is in the works for this year if need be?

That's why we're talking to ECC, because it's through their guidance that we would develop, you know, this is sheltering in place, this is a partial community evacuation, this is a full community evacuation. 

Any idea of how this year's plan could differ from last year? 

At the end of the day, a framework would be the same. You always start with sheltering in a community all the way up to the full evacuation, but it's how that information is presented that would be different. One of the points I appreciated last night was that people felt that the recovery phase was clear. 

That plain language plan, is that something that the public can expect to see in the next couple months? 

We're updating our website, and that's one of the key things to have that information for residents. It's making sure that residents know what to do, when, and what the city and territorial government are doing. So stay tuned for that. 

It was one of the most jurisdictionally complicated evacuations in Canadian history because it was the city, the territorial government, and then all of the cities and provincial governments mostly across the Western part of Canada. There's lots to learn and improve on.

Other than coming up with a plan and communications strategy around it, can you talk about what the city is doing to prepare for this upcoming wildfire season? 

A lot of the work is on the comms and the planning. It is also cleaning up the fire breaks from last year and then the territorial government looks outside of the community boundaries. So they've been monitoring drought conditions, they'll be monitoring the holdover fires. So we're staying in close contact with ECC on that information to be aware of that situation. 

You mentioned that the whole report will be made public, when can residents see that? 

End of June is the deadline they're working towards.