Yellowknife election 2026: Rob Warburton interview 

Rob Warburton is running for a second term on Yellowknife City Council this fall.

“I want to run again so I can finish what we started,” he told Cabin Radio.

Like many people, Warburton said he came north for a summer 20 years ago and ended up staying.

He has worked as a raft guide, in construction and the corrections service. Fifteen years ago, Warburton got into what he says is his passion: building housing and development in downtown Yellowknife. He owns real estate investment company Outpost.

Warburton was first elected to council in 2022.

His platform for the 2026 election includes shifting the focus at City Hall from processes to outcomes, with a push for actions that support housing. Other priorities include growing the city’s tax base and more proactive enforcement of municipal bylaws.

Cabin Radio is aiming to interview all 21 candidates running for eight council seats. We have asked every candidate to list their four top priorities to guide those interviews.

Melissa Syer and Garett Cochrane are running for mayor. Cabin Radio is hosting a mayoral candidates’ debate on October 5 from 7-8:30pm at City Hall, which will be broadcast live on our Facebook page, website and app.

Election day is October 19. Early voting begins on October 5 and runs until October 16.

---

This interview was recorded on September 29. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Emily Blake: Why are you running for a second term as a councillor?

Rob Warburton: Our first term, I feel like we just got started. As most folks already know, it was a rather tumultuous start to our first term. Got in in ’22, did our budget, we went immediately into a labour disruption, and then communities were evacuating into Yellowknife in ’23, and then we all left in ’23.

I know we came back that fall of ’23, and the appearance would be that it was business as usual right after, but it took the city a very long time to just get back to situation normal. So we didn’t really get into things because we were just trying to keep the place functioning.

It’s also why you saw things like the community plan and transportation master plan come right at the end of our term, because those were started a long time ago, we ran out of time. I want to run again so I can finish what we started.

You want to prepare Yellowknife for the economic growth and rapid change that’s coming. As a city councillor, how do you hope to help the city do that over the next four years?

I grew up in a military town in Alberta, also an oil and gas town. I’ve seen booms. And I can see, in a good way, what’s coming for Yellowknife. Even just defence alone at the airport, JTFN expanding, never mind if major projects kick off or, God willing, Con Mine goes back in production. These are all good problems, but that pace is exponentially faster than we’ve ever had anything in the city for decades.

The way the city operates is still stuck in a mode that won’t meet that moment. I run a business where it’s always short of time or money. The city, like every other entity, is the same thing, which means we need to streamline and respond quicker to those things.

I just voted against the community plan because I didn’t think it did remotely what it needed to do to meet that moment. We need to shift the entire way we operate at the city so it’s more outcome focused and less focused on our own processes. Because the public doesn’t care about our processes, they care about the outcome.

What does being ready look like? How does the city need to shift and change?

Right now we’re very process focused and, frankly, we’re not really good at it. You know, click and fix, I don’t know how many times you hear people talk about click and fix. It shouldn’t be so hard to interact with your government and it shouldn’t be so hard to get a response out of it.

This means empowering staff more. There needs to be a quicker decision process and empowerment of people to make decisions. I fully appreciate that that may mean more mistakes are made, but you can’t have both.

The second priority you mentioned was advocating for actions that create housing, not more process. What would that look like on the ground?

This is very practical: land, land and land. We got some land to market but nowhere near enough on our last term. We’ve thankfully got Frame Lake coming our way. That was hard pressure on the territorial government to move more land, but we need more. I know the community plan had projections for 25 years and the numbers in it are great. I think those are fiction, I think they’re way too low, I think we need more land.

We have some areas of town that the city has owned for a very long time and we don’t seem to be able to touch. There’s an extension on Grace Lake South that was designed and built out a decade ago for 50 more homes. We can’t be so stuck ideologically on the idea of one way of doing it. It needs to be everything all at once.

What we saw was during our term, the private sector built over 470 homes in the city and our vacancy rate went down. It got worse. And that’s because there’s so much pent-up demand that we’re not meeting.

Our permitting process right now is why I didn’t support the community plan. In my opinion, what we did with the community plan is we took federal money to accelerate housing and then we added more steps, studies, processes. Only a bureaucracy would think adding steps would make things faster. So we need to streamline that.

We hear a lot about the cost of living from residents as a concern. What more or better do you think city council could be doing on this issue?

This winter is going to be rough, the price of heating oil is so high. The city does not control heating oil, but we’re going to be hit too, right? I’m very interested to see what the budget this year has for heating costs for our facilities, because they’re going to double like everybody else’s house.

So there’s only really three ways the city has. We can cut, which I know is a really popular narrative. I’ve heard a couple folks talk about cut, cut, cut. Well, please explain to me what service you don’t want any more in your city. Can we be leaner and meaner? Absolutely. We go over the budget line by line every year, but you’re not cutting your way to any prosperity. You’re not making things more affordable by cutting.

This idea of a zero-percent tax rate, which previous councils have done, that’s ridiculous. Inflation doesn’t care about your feelings. You have to recover that somehow.

The city’s revenue source, primarily, is property taxes. If we increase the residents, the population, and we increase the things being built like housing and space for businesses, then we grow that tax base. We’re spreading the same cost among a larger group of folks. We can solve two problems here. We can solve this housing problem, or address it meaningfully, and we can decrease the pressure on taxpayers.

The fourth priority you mentioned was increased bylaw enforcement. What would success in that area look like to you?

We have a very dedicated municipal enforcement division. We actually added a couple more MED officers for downtown to try to provide some presence, some coverage, so folks feel a bit safer downtown.

Let’s be very clear: MED is not a police service, they are bylaw enforcement. They don’t do criminal code enforcement, nor should they, nor am I advocating for them to become a police force. We have seen over our term, we kept adjusting their focus as bylaw tighter and tighter and tighter. And I don’t think we’re quite there yet.

When you look at the time and the activities they’re doing, they’re still spending the vast majority of their time doing Highway Traffic Act enforcement, they’re still giving people parking tickets, pulling people over for speeding and those kind of things. I really want them to focus on school zones, which was still a priority last term, but I would like them out of their car and enforcing bylaws that we hear a lot about. So garbage, unsightly land bylaws.

Right now, how the system is set up is it’s all complaint-based, so you’ve got to call as a resident to complain. I think that’s unfair. We should still take complaints, but it shouldn’t be solely action based on that. Get them out of their car more, get them enforcing bylaws.

If you’re re-elected, you’ll be one of eight councilors along with a mayor. How are you hoping to have your voice heard on these issues?

A lot of the work comes before you get to that council meeting. It’s making sure that you understand the priorities of the other councillors, and how the things I want fit into their priorities as well. Because these things are all, if you haven’t noticed, really intertwined, right?

I think this last term, as a council, we were fairly aligned. I didn’t agree, obviously, with my colleagues on everything, but it was amicable. We could have conversations, we could debate. So ensuring the next council still has that same tone, I think, is super important. We’ve seen down south when councils get super negative, litigious, and they start fighting each other. That’s not good for anybody.

As a last question, 21 candidates are running for council. Why should people vote for, and re-elect, you in particular?

I know what’s coming to the city and my day job, my expertise, I know can really reinforce and ensure that the city is ready. We don’t need more high-level policy documents, we don’t need more studies. Enough. We need more outcome focus. We need to do the things.

We talk about revitalization over and over again. That’s doing something, that’s businesses and buildings. That’s not an idea. I do the thing every day, I revitalize downtown as my day job, I build housing. I understand how this works intimately and all the barriers that are currently there at the city level. So I can focus in on the bits that will actually improve things.

I don’t need a consultant to tell me how to revitalize my downtown, I don’t need a consultant to tell me how to build a bike lane. I don’t need these things because I do them in my day job. And so I understand intimately how to do them, and I can bring that into reality, I can inject reality into the policy conversation and governance at council level.