Ben Hendriksen used a major speech in Yellowknife to call for action regarding a lack of available land and stress the need to “urgently adapt” to new economic realities.
At a ticketed Yellowknife Chamber of Commerce event on Friday, the city’s mayor covered a range of familiar themes.
Those included diversifying the economy, getting more land from the NWT government, building partnerships with other levels of government and Indigenous development corporations, and figuring out Yellowknife’s downtown.
He said the city and residents need to advocate on behalf of people with “more challenging lives than anyone sitting here today” while also doing “whatever we can to recognize the impact drugs are having on NWT communities.” Concrete actions for downtown investment, he said, are being considered for the city’s next budget.
Land, though, formed a major focus.
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Noting that three-quarters of land within Yellowknife’s boundaries is territorially controlled, Hendriksen said earlier efforts to get the GNWT to hand over that land in bulk didn’t seem to be paying off.
The mayor said the territory needs to “hear from the business community, not just me and council, that the land needs to move to us.”
The more land is under municipal control, the easier City Hall says development will be for much-needed housing or other interests like businesses.
“I speak for a lot of Yellowknifers when I say it is a really hard pill to swallow when we talk about building on cherished land – whether that’s existing green space within neighbourhoods, on publicly accessible areas near shoreline or on greenfield development on the edges of our city – when there are several prime locations of vacant, private and commissioner-owned land sitting unused within the existing built environment,” Hendriksen said.
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“We should realistically have several years of land ready to be sold … so there is not a multi-year delay that sees investment leave Yellowknife for somewhere else.
“There is in effect another city-sized amount of land that we don’t own or have direct control over.”
City ‘not trying to stifle growth’
A question-and-answer session after the mayor’s speech focused largely on the economic future of the city and territory.
Hendriksen had told his audience there is “a lot of opportunity out there but we also need to urgently adapt.”
He described a future where diamonds, the NWT’s current economic driver, are replaced by smaller-scale but more numerous critical minerals mines, and also promoted the city’s recent selection as a hub for the armed forces.
The mayor spoke of figuring out how to build work camps more readily in Yellowknife, finding opportunities for the local construction industry in a downturn, and being sure to vocally support major projects like the Arctic Security Corridor from Yellowknife to Nunavut.
More broadly, he said, the city “is not trying to stifle growth though, unfortunately, that is a sentiment I hear. Working together, we need to do better.” (He also stressed the city needs to ensure the growth of the tax burden on residents and businesses is slowed.)
“We can’t run the same playbook again,” Hendriksen said of the wider approach to the municipal and territorial economy in the years ahead. And while he spent time setting out his credentials as more than a “progressive politician with long hair who bikes and walks everywhere,” he said Yellowknife must embrace global developments to survive.
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“We need meaningful investment now, as electrification becomes the societal norm globally,” he said.
“Put simply, we can’t have a 21st-century economy or expectation of capital investment coming from outside the NWT or Canada when much of the city and territory continues to operate on mid 20th-century infrastructure.
“There are other places for investment to go if we can’t show the world that we’re a modern, 21st-century Arctic city.”
Not the first ‘state of the city’
Friday’s event – which filled two of the Explorer Hotel’s Katimavik rooms – had attracted attention for its ticketed format.
Even several paying attendees said privately that an important-sounding “state of the city” address being delivered at one group’s paid-for lunch, rather than at City Hall as a public speech, seemed odd. (Despite that, there was clear enthusiasm from paying customers. Hendriksen spoke to a full house of roughly 150 attendees.)
Reporters looking to cover Hendriksen’s speech in person were initially told anyone attending would need a ticket. That policy was later altered.
But this wasn’t the first time the chamber of commerce has held this type of event.
In 2012, the CBC described a near-identical chamber function as an “annual state of the city address,” at which then-mayor Gordon Van Tighem announced he would not seek re-election.
His successor, Mark Heyck, went on to deliver similar state of the city speeches. Whether any had been held more recently was not immediately clear.
“State of the city” is a play on the longstanding American practice of the president delivering an annual State of the Union address.
