Yellowknife election 2026: Jeremy Flatt interview

Jeremy Flatt lists housing and development, procurement, and downtown revitalization as key areas he’ll focus on if elected to Yellowknife City Council. 

He is also passionate about getting a dedicated performing arts centre built, among other arts initiatives.

Flatt, who has lived in Yellowknife for 16 years, is a former co-owner of the Fat Fox Café and now works for a local architecture and engineering consulting firm.

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.

Sarah Pruys: Why do you want to be a councillor?

Jeremy Flatt: Well, yeah, it is a hard question. It’s hard to pin it down, right? I think the main thing is that I am really invested in this city. I’ve lived here for a long time. I’ve lived here for 16 years. I live downtown. 

I got very invested in local economic issues when we had the Fat Fox, and I can see a lot of potential for the city, and I can also feel a bit of frustration about how we haven’t really made a lot of progress on certain things that people want to see progress on, particularly downtown. 

But I think, from a personal motivation standpoint, most of the things I really, really care about politically – people will maybe know me for advocating for electoral reform at the federal level – it’s all motivated by a genuine belief in civil society and democracy, building a better, a more equitable future for people. 

For an awful lot of those issues, the rubber hits the road at the city level. I’m excited to get into the details of that and the nuance of policy.

Tell me your thoughts on housing and development and how, at the municipal level, you think you can effect change?

The main thing the city can do is to improve transparency and simplicity in our development process, and encourage more people to start building. I think we need to diversify our property market here a little bit. We want to encourage citizen developers to get into building properties and maybe entering the rental market. 

The big obstacle we have is there’s a lot of uncertainty around the development process, and I think there’s things the city could do to improve that. 

We could have a much more open-door process where you go to the city with your questions about what development you might be able to pursue, where you need to start, and have somebody guide you through the process. 

I think we could make our community plan a lot clearer, more succinct, and that would benefit everybody because when something’s clearer, more specific and more succinct, it’s easier to enforce. 

That would make people more confident about investing in the city, whether they’re a big developer who wants to build a new 30-plex or a citizen developer who wants to buy a property and develop a duplex.

We can also open up the regulatory process a little bit more, so that people have the opportunity to weigh in favour of what developments they want to see in their neighborhoods, rather than just giving people the chance to launch an appeal against a development at a point where maybe a decision has already been made. 

Let’s move on to procurement policies as your next topic. Tell me where you’re standing with that.

The city is about to revise its Indigenous procurement policy. We need to do a better job of incentivising companies that have a physical presence in Yellowknife. We need to make things easier for those companies to get work the city is paying for, but we also need to encourage new companies that want to do business in Yellowknife to establish a physical presence here. 

There are some limits on what we can do around incentivizing local businesses – because the city is party to various trade agreements – but there are lots of municipalities in Canada that have pretty strong local incentive programs in their procurement policies that we could borrow.

I’d also really like to change the way we do our fee evaluation at the city level. I think we should move from a lowest bid gets the highest points model to a median fee model, where you take all of your different bids for a project and you look at what’s the median and the median gets the most points for the fee. 

That incentivizes contractors and bidders to think really, really carefully about what the project is actually going to cost and put a fair bid on it. Because a lot of northern companies struggle to compete purely on price with southern firms.

You talked about how we can borrow solutions for procurement policies from other cities. What kinds of solutions have you seen elsewhere that you think could be replicated here in Yellowknife?

In my day job, I work as a vendor to the City of Whitehorse and City of Iqaluit. I’m also a bit of a dork for these things. I’ve seen procurement policies from other smaller municipalities in northern Alberta and BC. I think there’s certainly elements of their procurement policies that we could borrow pretty quickly. 

The Municipality of Wood Buffalo has a separate section where, if you’re bidding or submitting a proposal, you basically have to lay out your plan for how your approach is going to benefit that local community, and you have to substantiate it. 

That’s something we could very easily incorporate in Yellowknife.

You live downtown, you were a former business owner downtown, and you have some strong feelings about downtown revitalization. What would you like to see?

I would love to be a guy who has a silver bullet solution, but the reality is I don’t think there really is one.

That being said, I think we have bylaws in place now that require larger developments downtown to have retail space on the ground floor. This is my personal hill to die on: retail space and other infrastructure that makes the most of that retail space. I think we can do a better job of strong-arming the people who want to build things downtown to actually include genuine retail space in their buildings.

I think if we have more people downtown, it will make life better for existing businesses, and it will also make it easier for people to open new businesses.

When we look at downtown, a lot of our perception of it being an unfriendly or unwelcoming place is actually just because there’s a lot of empty space. It’s easy for two or three people who are being rowdy and noisy to make a big, empty space feel unwelcoming. 

As soon as you have something nice in that space and more people using it, it changes the perception of it. That was the big lesson that came away from running the Fat Fox. People thought we were a bit crazy to build a friendly little family café right next to the Gold Range but, as soon as it was there and as soon as people got used to what it was, it made a big difference.

Bike lanes. I know that’s a very polarizing issue, but people deserve to know what they’re voting for. I love bike lanes. I think if there was better cycling infrastructure in the city, especially downtown – safe places to store your bikes, nice routes to ride with your family – you would see an improvement in foot traffic and bike traffic for businesses.

One big thing we could do is lobby the federal government, maybe get our former mayor to really push to change the tax laws so larger companies that have a lot of vacant space in the city are forced to prove the market value of the space that they have in their tax returns, so they’re not able to use the empty space to write off as a loss to offset the money they’re making elsewhere. That’s a real problem. 

I think it’s a disincentive for them to do something with their space that actually benefits the city. If Rebecca Alty is listening, let’s get on it.

I feel like a lot of the things you’ve talked about would rely on significant policy changes. Visual and performing arts support – probably less of a policy change and more of an advocacy role?

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been part of this group with Carmen Braden, Carly McFadden and Ambe Chenemu, trying to coax the city into investing in performing arts infrastructure, whether it’s a new performing arts centre or other performing arts infrastructure. 

One of the main reasons I decided to throw my hat in to run for council was that our little group is not quite at the point where we can make specific requests of councillors. But I didn’t want to wait, and none of us wanted to wait another four years to do anything or to be able to put any pressure on elected officials. So this was my best option.

There are lots of groups trying to advocate for this in various ways. When you say being on council is a way to keep this at the forefront, what’s the end goal?

Good question. One of the things I really want to do is keep pursuing funding. 

We made a big point of trying to put this idea to the city as a cost-neutral project to begin with. We want to go out and track down funding for the city to pursue this project. 

The city has some pretty tough financial decisions to make over the next few years, and we – I say we, I’m wearing my advocate hat at the moment – don’t want to be seen to be making demands for the city to spend more than it can afford. 

As a city councillor, I would be really keen to continue looking for funding, but also being that voice within the administration who channels that support from people for this idea and finding ways the city can support it. 

One thing we could do is add a little bit of money for performing arts programming within the city’s existing programming. They do stuff like summer camps for kids and there’s already infrastructure in place for that. It would be really great to see some more performing arts programming.

How many council meetings have you watched?

I’d say about four over the last year. I meant to watch the most recent one where they were discussing the community plan because there’s a lot of stuff in the community plan I want to dig into, but I haven’t had time to do it yet. But I will.

I’ve been to a few of them. You know, hanging around, scowling at people in the background, that stuff.

And lastly, your elevator pitch. Why should people vote for you?

I am committed to being the best public servant I can be. I’m very profoundly committed to democracy and restoration of civil society. 

I live downtown. I’m very invested in the city. My children go to school here. I think I am an effective advocate for issues. I am somebody who cares about details, who cares about policy. 

I’m good at working with other people, and that’s what council comes down to. 

If I could have a final thought: regardless of whether you vote for me or not, please pay attention to the dynamics of this race and notice what’s not happening, and notice that none of the councillors are tearing each other down. The whole incentive in this race is to show you’re a conscientious person who listens to constituents and you’re capable of working with other councillors who don’t necessarily agree with you. 

The reason we’re able to have this lovely, friendly, constructive election and friendly discourse is that we are not vote splitting. We’re all hoping to be elected to one of eight seats. It is a multi-member riding by accident, but it’s great and it changes the dynamic of the race completely. 

This is what proportional representation would deliver at other levels of government. I want to demonstrate to people that this system works. That’s a good reason to vote for me.