Should a work camp be allowed in this part of Yellowknife?

A company wants to build a work camp that could house hundreds of people who would currently struggle to find accommodation in Yellowknife’s housing market. City Hall isn’t a fan.

The issue is not the need. Everyone involved agrees Yellowknife urgently needs more places to live.

The problem is the proposed location.

Homes North wants to build a work camp – temporary modular housing for workers – on a patch of land in the Engle Business District, an industrial area on the western edge of Yellowknife near the city’s airport.

City staff say that’s too close to heavy industry, the airport and a military facility, and a work camp in the area “does not represent good land use planning.”

On Monday, councillors concluded the application shouldn’t move forward – but a comprehensive rethink of work camps, which has been coming for a while, is expected in the months ahead. It’s possible the project could make a comeback in some form.

“We do need work camps,” said councillor Stacie Arden-Smith, expressing excitement for the forthcoming update of Yellowknife’s community plan that is expected to make work camps easier to establish.

But councillors decided the city shouldn’t make an exception for Homes North, in an area where staff have concerns, before that wider update has taken place.

Changing bylaws now to let the Homes North project happen “would send the wrong message,” councillor Tom McLennan said.

What the plan looks like

According to a city planning report, Homes North envisages building “three buildings of 114 dorm units in total, with individual sanitary facilities and a communal kitchen/dining facility on site.”

The project was first presented to council more than a year ago.

Homes North’s Sandra McDaniel, who showed Cabin Radio the site in the fall of 2024, said the land could ultimately hold 450 rooms if fully developed.

“The big challenge right now is to convince council that they can see themselves allowing the facility to go there,” McDaniel acknowledged at the time.

She emphasized that if Homes North got the green light, the land – which it owns – could be immediately developed. “We’ve got the right spot for it. We can do it now,” she said.

At a meeting on Monday, consultants Stantec – who are representing Homes North in the formal application to council – said the city was making a mistake in seeing the camp as a residential use of land and drawing conclusions about suitability from that.

“We think it really needs to be thought about differently,” said Stantec’s Zoe Morrison by video link.

“Hotels are a place where people stay, but they are defined differently and allowed differently under the zoning. We believe that work camps also need to be considered differently.

“One of the things we always think about when we’re planning in industrial areas is you don’t want people living there because you don’t want kids waiting for the school bus, you don’t want people asking for playgrounds. These work camps are really different. It’s not intended that there would be kids or families living there.”

McDaniel painted a picture in the fall of long-haul truck drivers using the camp as somewhere to rest instead of sleeping inside their vehicles, or contract workers at the Giant Mine remediation basing themselves there rather than taking up the city’s existing – and strained – reserves of accommodation.

“You walk in the door, you hang up your work coat, put your boots in the mud room and the food is all ready to go,” she said.

“You’ve got a nice night of sleep ahead of you. It would feed so many needs.”

Safety concerns

Councillors, in deciding not to overrule city planning staff, said they liked that idea in principle but couldn’t overlook problems associated with the location.

“This location, I’m having a hard time with,” said councillor Rob Warburton.

“It’s so hard for me to say that out loud. I want these so badly but I feel like we’re forcing these things to come forward because there are no other viable large chunks of dirt available.”

Warburton wants the NWT government to speed up the process by which the Department of Environment and Climate Change hands over tracts of land within the city’s boundary so they fall under municipal control. If and when that happens, it could provide alternative locations for this kind of camp.

Land availability and its transfer to the city have been political issues for years.

City manager Stephen Van Dine said the city is in a “fairly broad-ranging and deep discussion with our colleagues at the GNWT” about the availability of land. Meanwhile, the city is expected to have more commercial and residential land available in the short to medium term, with announcements expected over the course of 2025.

A workaround of sorts already exists to allow worker accommodation in Kam Lake. The update to the community plan should formalize the concept of work camps, guidelines for them and where they can or cannot go.

City public safety director Craig MacLean, in particular, was uncompromising in his assessment that the proposed Engle Business District site isn’t suitable without major changes to lessen the risk.

While McDaniel had pointed to the nearby military facility and suggested that it showed the city was happy to have some form of accommodation in the area, MacLean raised a series of concerns about a work camp in an industrial area.

MacLean rejected the idea that the work camp was not a residential proposition, noting it would likely be occupied by at least some people around the clock, throughout the year.

“We’re not opposed to work camps. However, having any residential-type occupancy located in a designated industrial zone, in proximity to large propane storage facilities and bulk fuel storage tanks, is not the safest decision in our opinion,” MacLean told council.

He said getting water out to that area in the event of a fire would present challenges. Assuming that some workers rely on buses to get to and from the camp, he questioned how that might affect an evacuation of the site if a threat developed nearby. The site is also near the fuel breaks the city just built to guard against wildfires, he added.

MacLean ended by pointing to Toronto’s Sunrise Propane incident, a 2008 series of explosions that took place in a North York neighbourhood, triggering the evacuation of thousands of people and leading to the deaths of two people.

“Not to say that that would happen,” he said, “but those are the worst-case scenarios.”

‘Conversation citywide’

Ultimately, both Stantec and city officials said they wanted the same thing: a chance for the public to have a say.

“A public hearing would provide the opportunity to hear from residents, from surrounding landowners, to hear from our client, from companies and contractors that might use this type of accommodation for their workers,” said Stantec’s Morrison.

The city, though, wants a broader form of public engagement through the process of updating the community plan. (Stantec representatives said they hadn’t been aware that such a process was coming up.)

“What we need to do is have a conversation citywide,” said city planning director Charlsey White. “Where is the best place for these to go? What does it look like and how do we get there?”

From January 2024: More worker accommodation to be built in Yellowknife

Councillor Cat McGurk added: “What I am looking for from the proponent is not that we need this thing. We know we need this thing.

“What I’m looking for is: if you want us to do this, you need to provide an argument that it is safe that our administration can agree with. Right now, the main issue is that this is not considered a safe place to put people.”

Correction: January 14, 2025 – 16:37 MT. This article initially stated the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs controls the process of handing over land to municipalities. It’s actually the Department of Environment and Climate Change – a department that includes the old Department of Lands, which is why ECC holds that responsibility even though its name no longer reflects that.