Once a lonely Liberal, outgoing Yukon Premier Silver reflects on six years at the top

Yukon Premier Sandy Silver participates in a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in his office in West Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on Friday, Dec. 9, 2022. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang)

DAWSON CITY, Yukon — Ask Sandy Silver about his path from being the only Liberal in the Yukon's legislature to the territory's premier and he will often pivot back to the community he represents, Dawson City, about 500 kilometres north of Whitehorse.

A former math teacher at the community's only school, he would become Yukon's first premier from the Klondike and only the second Liberal premier in the party's 45-year history.

As he prepares to hand over the job to his key cabinet minister and close friend Ranj Pillai, who was acclaimed as party leader over the weekend, Silver says he can still remember the feeling of returning to Dawson City after the party's dismal results in the 2011 election.

The Liberals had gone from being the official opposition to having only two sitting MLAs. Within months the only other Liberal would leave the party to sit as an independent.

Silver was the last Liberal standing.

In an interview last week, Silver said he drove back to Dawson City, unsure whether he was in the best position to represent his community.

But Dawson City rallied around him, he said. He moved there in 1998 after a few years of living and teaching in Whitehorse.

"(A friend said) 'listen, none of that means anything to us in your community. We hired you to do the job, go do your job and we've got your back,"' he remembered.

The conversation triggered a realization, said Silver, "like night and day -- it just switched in my brain -- and I said this is an opportunity. So, how do we use this as an opportunity?"

Longtime Liberal strategist Jason Cunning met Silver at an event for candidates ahead of the 2011 election and would go on to be his chief of staff, one of the only paid staffers in the office during those thin years.

He said people in Dawson City, previously a conservative Yukon Party seat, were comfortable voting for a person they like, not just a party, and recognized Silver as "a real, approachable, genuine person."

Cunning, who is now the principal secretary for the Liberal cabinet, said Silver was a natural at connecting with people face-to-face, something the party used to its advantage during the 2016 campaign.

Some politicians, "you wouldn't trust them with your dog," Cunning said.

But he said Silver, originally from Antigonish, Nova Scotia, was the opposite.

"The challenge was, can we get him in front of enough people in time for the 2016 election?"

Silver said Dawson City helped him gain a clear understanding of what the party he was building needed to be.

"It was a model of what works in Dawson. In Dawson, there's no lines drawn in the sand from First Nations to non First Nations. People don't talk politics necessarily in the community and we're all, at minus 40, at The Pit, at the bar," he said.

"It's a mosaic of people that are all doing their best to be part of the community, and (are) putting our egos aside and just working on a bigger picture of the community."

Silver would oversee a dramatic reversal of fortune for the party, with the Liberals sweeping to power with a majority in 2016, winning 11 of the legislature's 19 seats, after 14 years of conservative Yukon Party governments.

In the 2021 election, the Liberals and the Yukon Party tied with eight seats apiece, but Silver retained power courtesy of a confidence and supply agreement with the NDP that is now on the verge of expiring.

He announced in September he was stepping down as premier and did not intend to run in the territory's general election in 2025.

Silver said he was proud of bringing First Nations governments into the fold, and proving "you don't have to pick the environment or the economy (alone)."

Highlights during his time as premier include the resurrection of annual Yukon Forum meetings between government officials and First Nations, the creation of a First Nations school board, and climate initiatives like legislated targets for reducing greenhouse emissions, he said.

"The case of the government being able to get more sophisticated and honour the treaties, that did so much for investor confidence, for reconciliation confidence, for climate confidence," Silver said.

"I think that that's hopefully what I'll be remembered for in my time in office."

He said Pillai's biggest challenge will be deciding what to do when the supply agreement with the NDP expires.

Yukon Party Opposition Leader Currie Dixon called the premier's legacy "very mixed" in a statement issued when Silver announced he would step down.

Dixon said Silver's handling of sexual abuse cases in a Yukon school, and his refusal to dismiss the former minister of education, were "a stain on his legacy and that of the Yukon Liberal Party."

He also said that thousands of Yukoners were without a family doctor, and the education system was in a "shambles."

For his part, Silver wouldn't talk about regrets.

"I'm not going to dwell on anything. You make your best decisions with the information you have at the time," he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 10, 2023