Yellowknife election 2026: Steve Payne interview

Steve Payne is hoping to be elected to a fourth and final term as a Yellowknife city councillor, a role he’s held for more than a decade.

Originally from Newfoundland, Payne said he has lived in Yellowknife for the past 31 years.

“I really look at this place as my long-term home – I’ve always wanted to leave it better than how I found it,” said Payne.

He said he still has a lot to contribute to the city.

“I’ve got three terms in, and I feel like I got some valid and important experience to be able to do one more term.”

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.

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

Claire McFarlane: You mentioned housing development as one of your priorities. What are some of the biggest barriers to getting more housing built in Yellowknife that you’d like to try to overcome in this term, if re-elected?

Steve Payne: The biggest barrier that we’ve had in the last four years – actually, it’s been the last eight years – is getting land from the GNWT.

We have some infill properties that we’re looking at doing right now, but those infill properties come with their own issues. It’s usually in someone’s backyard. People are upset about building in their neighbourhoods, but we need building. We need housing. We needed it yesterday. Now with the military spending that’s coming up, we need housing more than we’ve ever needed before. There’s been estimates of up to 1,200 properties that we need over the next 15-20 years.

I think the biggest barrier was actually land. Now we’re at the the tail end of getting the Frame Lake property ready for development, so that should be signed over I’m assuming fairly soon, in the next couple months. Then we can look at getting that stuff surveyed, engineered, ready for market.

What have you learned throughout the last few terms about how to get land transferred from the GNWT and how to unlock it for development?

We’ve applied for small blocks of land. We’ve applied for pretty big blocks of land. We’ve taken the advice of the GNWT in every way, and still, it’s taken a long time to get stuff done. Our MLAs seem to be on board – they’re very supportive in what we’re trying to do – and I mean, let’s not kid ourselves, a strong Yellowknife is a strong territory and vice versa. If we get lots of action here, that trickles into communities. As a territory, we all come up together.

I’ve learned we definitely need to have patience, but we need to be prepared. We got caught with our pants down with having no land that we could bring to market. This is not just the last term or the term before. This probably started 15 years ago, 16, 17 years ago, that we never had enough land. We’re only seeing what we need it for now and for the next couple years. But we need to be looking 10, 15 years down the road.

What does it mean to look at infill development, too? You mentioned it’s often in people’s backyards and they’re not always the happiest about it. What are some ways you might be able to leverage existing city-owned land to get more housing built in some of those areas?

When it comes to infill, it’s a really difficult situation. People are very emotional about their properties, about their areas and about the green spaces close to their areas. Those green spaces are the spaces we need or want to develop. Those are the low-hanging fruit right now. They’re within the city boundaries. They’re within control. If we’re going to develop anything, it would be those.

I wish we weren’t in a situation where we had to even look at these properties. I wish we had Frame Lake ready to go. I wish we had different areas in town where we could actually do development and we didn’t have to go after these small spaces, but these small spaces – they have water and sewer fairly close. They’re fairly inexpensive to develop, and the main thing we want to do up here is we need to have more money for the City of Yellowknife.

The world is changing around us, and we need to be able to respond to it. Usually, that’s a higher level of service. People are demanding that, the public are demanding that. Every time we turn around, any contracts we’re wanting to do, they’re coming in five, six, seven times higher than what we budgeted for, so we need more money, and that’s increased taxation with more properties.

You also mentioned military spending. There has been a lot of talk about leveraging some of that spending to benefit the City of Yellowknife. What does that look like to you?

Any time the military goes into a community and they’re doing major work – maybe there’s projects or things the city would have wanted to do, but really didn’t have the funding for it. By leveraging the military money, it’s maybe improving certain areas, updating a pumphouse, getting water and sewer to areas we didn’t anticipate we were ever going to be able to afford to get.

That opens up whole new areas for development. As an example, if we went around Deh Cho Boulevard and up Engle with water and sewer, that opens up that whole area, and maybe a new airport [terminal] up there. And that’s not the city, but we’re getting work done where we can have the possibility of something like that.

That’s how we leverage the military money. They’re not just coming here and building X or Y. They’re coming here and they’re actually providing money to update our infrastructure, so we can provide them with a better level of service.

You mentioned tourism is a priority for you. What does that look like for you, and why do you think it should be prioritized?

Tourism is never going to take over from the missing diamond mines that are all closing up. It’s never going to be an industry that’s going to replace that. But for a city like Yellowknife, it can make a big difference when it comes to the hospitality industry and the restaurant industry, and tourism sort-of helps everything. It’s going to help the little souvenir stores, the coffee shops, the clothing stores.

Right now, I still feel that Yellowknife is in its infancy when it comes to tourism. But I feel that we’re going to be booming in the next 10 years, and it’s not just the northern lights industry. We’re on one of the biggest lakes in the world. We have the best fishing in the world. We have the the best landscape in the world. We have good things here that people in the rest of Canada, the United States, the world will want to pay to come and see.

We need more hotels, and we can see the building of hotels this year. There’s a lot more rooms coming to the market, which is great. We need more car rental companies. It would be nice to have more restaurants and maybe some high-end places for people to put their money.

I would love to see Yellowknife as a conference centre, people would want to come here from all over to do their business conferences. We’re going to need somebody in the business world to step up and maybe build that centre. With the way things are going right now, everything seems to be pointing in that direction. We’re having one-offs of conferences now, even with the spaces we have, and they’re pretty impressive actually. People are pretty happy to be here.

What does it look like to encourage more of those types of businesses to open in Yellowknife?

We need to have the properties available for people to want to open businesses up.

We’re hopefully going to do ‘Kam Lake 2.0,’ we call it. Those are the smaller businesses that would want small to medium sized lots to operate their business. Then we have Engle that has the big properties. Every day we’re hearing about different companies sniffing around up here, looking at building their own shops and their own buildings. The smaller mom-and-pop shops need rentals.

If we’re going to be doing housing development up here, why not incorporate some retail spaces along with it? We have a downtown area here that I think could come a long way as well, and maybe be strategic in what is on the main street, instead of businesses that don’t really need the walk-in traffic. Maybe we are strategic about what we place in those spaces, and maybe we have incentives to get that going, to help landlords, maybe manoeuvre that part.

I’m excited about tourism. I come from a place in Newfoundland where tourism has actually somewhat saved the island. I come from a place called Fogo Island, and it’s booming right now for the summer months, and we’re pretty fortunate [in Yellowknife] that I feel we have a good tourism industry all year round.

You’ve completed three terms as a city councillor. Is there anything you haven’t been able to do in the past three terms that you’d like to do in a fourth?

There’s a lot. The thing with being on council is you’re part of a team and things get passed as a team, things get rejected as a team. We have to own that as a team. It’s like being a part of a living document. Things change weekly and our job is to be reactive to the situation we have.

I’m not bogging down administration with personal goals that I have, per se. I don’t feel like I need that. I’m there to cast those hard votes, and I have no problem casting hard votes. In the past, I’ve gotten beaten up by the public a bit because of certain votes, but I think that’s part of the job. My friend group has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller with each term. It’s unfortunate, but I think that’s the way it goes.

Why should people vote for you?

You’re never going to hear me beg for people’s votes. I’m not that kind of person. Every day when we have to make decisions on city council, I make those decisions based on my morals and my values, and I’m going to be honest. And some people aren’t going to like the way I vote, but I am what I am, so you can vote for me or not.

If I see you at the grocery store, I’m still going to say hi to you. I guess I’m hoping people have seen the integrity I brought to the position over the last 11 years, and I’m willing to keep on doing that. You’re never going to question where I am and what I support.

Generally speaking, what is it you support?

I support openness. I support facts over feelings. I support getting stuff done that makes sense and the common sense way of doing things, and saving money. I’m probably labelled as a fiscal conservative, and, if we don’t need to spend money, I don’t think we should.

I don’t think we should be studying things to death at a cost of $100,000 for each study we do. I don’t think we should be bending to too many fad requests from the public. We need to get down to business, and I’ve heard – and I think this is a stupid comment – but I’ve used it, the ‘dogs, ditches and dumps.’

The fluff comes when we have extra money, and we can worry about that when we get more housing in this community, when we get a bigger tax base we can draw upon. Right now, we really need to get back to basics.