What happens when your employer decides to tear down your cabin?

It’s early 2021. You just started your new job at the Department of Lands. It’s five years since you gave a guy $7,500 for a little cabin on a corner of Banting Lake, north of Yellowknife.

Heading out for a winter visit to the cabin, you find a notice stapled to the door.

It’s the Department of Lands – that new employer of yours – beginning a campaign to crack down on unauthorized cabins.

Awkward.

These are the circumstances that faced Tom van Dam according to documents associated with an NWT Supreme Court civil case in which the territory is seeking to enforce an order that Van Dam tear down his cabin.

Should the cabin be there? Probably not, if you apply the letter of the law. The person who sold the cabin to Van Dam didn’t offer much reassurance that it rested on solid legal ground, according to the evidence, and an inspector – and a series of departmental officials – have all said it needs to go.

But there are complexities.

Van Dam says the owners of two other nearby cabins have been allowed to apply for leases (in other words, go legal), despite what he says are near-identical circumstances. He hasn’t been given that chance.

He also accuses the GNWT of placing evidence before the court that isn’t entirely accurate.

More than anything, he says the GNWT has trampled all over a whopping conflict of interest that he had been attempting to handle carefully and appropriately.

The territorial government says in its own representation to the court that no documents authorize the cabin to be there, so it has to go.

In NWT Supreme Court on Friday, counsel for the GNWT said this was a straightforward case that could be handled inside half an hour.

However, NWT Supreme Court Justice Sheila MacPherson said Van Dam – representing himself in court – had “raised a couple of issues that may need some consideration [and] probably deserve a hearing in my view.”

Cabin cases head to court

Van Dam has declined to comment on his case, but the documentation filed in court already is extensive.

Aside from the minutiae of where exactly the cabin is, its history and why it should or shouldn’t be there, the documents also show Van Dam accusing his department of doing a really bad job of handling his case, both as a cabin owner and as a territorial employee.

The GNWT has pledged to crack down on unauthorized cabins across the territory, not least because their presence can complicate land negotiations with Indigenous governments. In 2021, then-minister Shane Thompson said the territory would assign millions of dollars to the work and dedicate years to the “longstanding issue” of squatters.

But many owners of suspect cabins have all kinds of reasons that they believe their cabin should be there, even if the territory disagrees, so open-and-shut cases are rare.

The GNWT thinks more than 700 cabins might be illegal.

As of mid-January, the Department of Environment and Climate Change (the successor to Lands, which no longer exists) said 41 sites had received a second posting – a form of final warning that your cabin has got to go.

Of those, four sites have been cleaned up and cabins have been removed. Six others are now undergoing what the department calls “voluntary removal.”

Three cases are currently before the courts, Van Dam’s included, and the department said it was “preparing to initiate legal action on an additional nine sites.” The remainder are moving through the department’s internal process.

Stage one of that process from a cabin owner’s perspective is the first posting – a letter that asks the owner of a suspect cabin to write to ECC and identify themselves.

The GNWT and Van Dam agree that he did that within a day of the notice being stabled to his cabin, explaining exactly who he was and how to reach him.

In court documents, the GNWT and Van Dam also agree that the GNWT completely ignored Van Dam’s email. The GNWT does not explain why it did that.

Van Dam says this is important in part because GNWT officials had been telling reporters that people with suspect cabins could have a route to land tenure if their cabins met certain criteria. He says his cabin met the stated criteria and he had hoped to initiate that process, but simply never heard back, despite following instructions.

Instead, a year later, Van Dam found the fateful second posting stapled to the door.

Handling the conflict

Meanwhile, Van Dam says the efforts he made to keep the cabin issue separate from his work were rendered useless by the GNWT.

Van Dam appears to have worked quite closely with the people at Lands (and then ECC) who were going after illegal cabins, though his current role, as a data manager, isn’t on the front line of that work.

Within weeks of joining the department in 2021, Van Dam testifies that he sought out a senior manager “to declare my conflict of interest regarding my site being a UO,” using an initialism for unauthorized occupancy.

He says he was told to make sure he wasn’t actively involved in any unauthorized occupancy files, but could otherwise carry out his regular duties.

Yet in February 2022, Van Dam says he only found out his cabin would be recommended for removal – a final step, involving the minister’s sign-off – when a manager pulled him aside for a verbal conversation inside the division’s own offices, during work hours.

The GNWT has a formal “record of conversation” of this exchange, which it placed among its evidence in the Supreme Court case. Van Dam, in his own affidavit, says that stunned him.

“The request for the meeting was done verbally, inside the office of the Land Management and Administration division, during work hours … despite my declaration of a conflict of interest on the file,” his affidavit states.

“Because of this choice of time and venue I had presumed this meeting to be informal, since during the conversation it was not indicated to me that this was my formal notice that my site would not be permitted to remain, or that a record of conversation of this meeting would be included in the briefing package submitted to the minister.

“The time and venue of this meeting put me in an uncomfortable and awkward situation. I have taken the utmost care to adhere to the GNWT Public Service Code of Conduct. This meeting, requested by a GNWT official who is my superior, placed me into a position where the lines became inappropriately blurred.”

‘Great emotional value’

The extent to which the GNWT’s handling of the conflict of interest might save Van Dam’s cabin is not clear.

But Justice MacPherson appeared interested in at least two other arguments Van Dam has advanced.

Firstly, MacPherson said she wanted to hear more about “the issue of an alleged discrepancy in the material provided to the minister” regarding the recommendation that the cabin be removed.

Van Dam says small things, like the presence of dates, appear to change between items like the notice stapled to his cabin and the copy of that notice shown in court documents. He also says documents provided to the minister state his cabin didn’t meet the criteria that would allow him to apply for land tenure – without ever demonstrating which criteria it failed.

MacPherson also wants to know more about why some cabin owners on Banting Lake were given the go-ahead to apply for land tenure, at least according to Van Dam, and he wasn’t.

To the judge, that assertion suggests “there are some challenges in the decision-making process.”

“I’m not commenting on the veracity or the weight or merit of those issues, but they probably deserve a hearing in my view,” she said in court on Friday, responding to the GNWT’s suggestion that things could be wrapped up quickly.

Van Dam has been given a short window to decide some aspects of how he wants to proceed, then the case is expected to go to a hearing.

The GNWT maintains that staff have “not located any lease, agreement or other document which would authorize the respondent’s use, possession or occupation of the site,” but the territory has not yet addressed Van Dam’s suggestion that cabin owners in similar situations have been treated differently.

Van Dam, closing his affidavit, writes: “My reason for pursuing this matter, despite the possibility of an unproductive and expensive outcome for me, is the great emotional value I place on my site and the cabin.”