Enterprise, under administrator, dealing with ‘big rift in community’

The outgoing mayor of Enterprise said the community and its council have been “divided” since a 2023 wildfire and need help to address major issues.

On Wednesday, the NWT government said it was dissolving the hamlet’s mayor and council. A public administrator, former Inuvik town manager Grant Hood, is being brought in.

While the GNWT has referred only to unspecified financial, operational and governance challenges, Mike St Amour – acclaimed as mayor in December last year – said Enterprise had failed to file some reporting and its council was dysfunctional.

“I’m disappointed that it had to come to this. I really thought that we could pull together as a community and get things sorted out,” St Amour told Cabin Radio on Thursday.

“It’s just that there’s a big divide in the community.”

St Amour characterizes that divide as a split between people who had insurance before a wildfire destroyed most of the hamlet two summers ago, and people who did not.

Insurance is not always readily available in some NWT communities. Some residents have criticized the territorial and federal governments for what they have perceived as shifting levels of commitment to help both the insured and uninsured rebuild.

In May last year, dozens of residents without insurance were brought to a meeting and informed they would not receive financial help to rebuild.

“They started segregating the people – the insured, the non-insured. That created a big rift in the community because people weren’t being treated the same, and that rift is still present today,” St Amour said.

“There’s basically people that are really upset and they don’t want nothing to do with anything, and then there’s people that are trying to rebuild.

“The council is divided. There’s some councillors that didn’t show up for meetings for the past month, and it was stifling us. We couldn’t do anything without them and we couldn’t move forward. We couldn’t get things done in a timely fashion.”

No timeline for administrator

Vince McKay is the minister whose department, Municipal and Community Affairs, broke the news to the uninsured residents a year ago.

Now, the Hay River MLA is also the minister sending in a public administrator to take over from Enterprise’s council.

“It’s definitely difficult to make that decision,” McKay said on Thursday, declining to go into detail about the reasons for it.

“It’s a little bit of everything,” was as much as he would say.

“We can go back to the stressful times of the fires and there’s definitely some issues there with rebuilding,” McKay acknowledged.

“I won’t say that we’re going to fix it all right away. There’s obviously some issues that have to be dealt with but at the same time, I hope we can move it forward quickly and give it back to the community.”

There is no timeline by which Hood is expected to have turned around Enterprise’s affairs, McKay said.

Similarly, there is still no timeline for Fort Resolution to move out of administration and back to a mayor and council – almost two years after that community’s elected officials suffered the same fate as those in Enterprise.

“They are communities that share the same issues,” McKay said of the two, “struggling with good governance.”

For Enterprise, he continued: “We’ve tried to not go in this direction but we’ve ultimately had to, and it’s not something we like to do. But at the same time, Mr Hood, when he gets in there, he’ll be able to give us an assessment of what we’re looking at.

“I’m pretty certain that it’s not as bad as what we would think. It’s just a matter of getting some good governance in there.”

St Amour thinks time is the main thing Enterprise needs. Time to rebuild, time to help residents heal and patch up the rift.

“It’ll come back together because we’re all stubborn, we all love the community,” he said.

“We all love our neighbours but we all have different views on how to do things, and it’s choosing the right path and moving forward together as a group.

“We can’t do it on our own. It’ll take the federal government, the GNWT and ourselves to work things out and get things going on the right path.”