Why Yellowknife has Conan the Barbarian election signs

“Crush our enemies. See them driven before us. Stronger representation for women.”

If the signs that appeared in Yellowknife this week are to be believed, that’s the campaign platform of Conan the Barbarian in the Northwest Territories riding.

There have been a few Conans the Barbarian over time. The signs suggest this one is very much the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan.

In the fine print? A message about proportional representation.

“It’s me. It was me. Guilty as charged,” admitted Jeremy Flatt when Cabin Radio called him on Friday morning and asked simply what he knew about Conan the Barbarian.

Yellowknife resident Flatt, a longtime proponent of proportional representation and veteran of political attention-getting, is behind Conan’s federal election signs.

Flatt insists he has taken care to comply with the relevant legislation in terms of where the signs are positioned and the content they contain.

The signs direct people to Fair Vote Canada, a national campaign for proportional representation – a system that would give parties a number of seats roughly equivalent to the number of people who vote for that party.

The current system, dubbed first past the post, gives seats to the winners from each riding but doesn’t do anything with all the votes for parties finishing second and beyond. Fair Vote Canada argues that leads to distorted outcomes.

Flatt said he chose Conan to be the face of his campaign after seeing various candidates’ signs in the 2023 territorial election.

“You know the format: Name of person, three things,” he said, describing what those signs would contain.

“Sometimes they’re good,” he said of the three promises or talking points people would list on their signs. “Sometimes they’re a little vague or meaningless.”

This got him thinking of a scene in the 1982 Conan the Barbarian where Schwarzenegger’s Conan finds himself around a fire with a Mongol warlord, being asked to describe what is best in life.

“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women,” Conan replies.

In the year 2025, that last part has received a bit of an update.

“I didn’t really like the idea of lamentations of women being part of any election platform,” Flatt said, “so I thought this would be a nice opportunity to subvert that.”

Conan now advocates for better representation of women, which Flatt argues proportional representation has been shown to deliver. 

“I just really hope people see it in the spirit of fun,” he said. “I wanted to do something that would give people a bit of a giggle and raise the profile of proportional representation.”

If you’re so persuaded by Conan that you want to volunteer, Flatt says he could use help getting the word out. Contact him by email if you’re interested.

Yellowknife has history with signs

In most election campaigns, something goofy, awkward or unfortunate happens to election signs in Yellowknife.

In 2015, city council candidate Dane Mason placed inventive signs with a circular hole cut out that allowed people to place their head in the picture. (He wasn’t elected.)

Another ultimately unsuccessful council candidate in 2018, Chris Gillander, had his signs defaced – but then delivered a masterclass in taking the high road by transforming the vandalism into artwork that depicted him as a wizard.

In that same campaign, sign vandalism was so prevalent that candidates teamed up to go around cleaning each other’s signs.

When a territorial election took place in 2019, the drop-off in sign vandalism was so noticeable that the lack of defaced signs prompted a news article of its own.

But the sign détente didn’t last forever. A month later, a member of a candidate’s campaign team was forced to apologize for tampering with another candidate’s signs. And in 2023, sign vandalism had returned.

That said, nothing quite like Conan has been seen in recent Yellowknife election history.

If you’re wondering how the NWT’s candidates feel about proportional representation, listen to our election debate podcast for that answer and more.