Yellowknife election 2026: Skye Plowman interview

Skye Plowman, bartender and stand-up comedian, says the future is bright for Yellowknife. She urges everyone to vote for optimism on October 19.

A resident of Yellowknife since 2014, Plowman said she originally came up the summer before to work a summer job at the Explorer Hotel. She said it was a “cool-sounding town on a cool-sounding lake.”

“I arrived and immediately I fell in love with the bar. I fell in love with the hotel. And I fell in love with the community that surrounded it,” Plowman said of Yellowknife.

Since then, she’s performed as a stand-up comedian and host on local stages.

Her platform, based on her limitless care for the city, focuses on increasing housing, supporting the arts and tourism, and revitalizing Yellowknife’s downtown.

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 hosted a mayoral candidates’ debate on October 5 at City Hall. You can watch the debate on Cabin Radio’s Facebook page or listen to it on Spotify.

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

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This interview was recorded on October 2, 2026. The transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Miriam Bosiljevac: Before this interview, I asked you to tell me four of your priority issues, one of which was housing. That can be all kinds of things. What specifically about housing do you see as being the most urgent issue?

Skye Plowman: In brief, more of it. We don’t have enough houses in town. We don’t have enough middle houses in town, and by that I mean we don’t have enough duplexes or triplexes or townhouses or walk-ups. I’m not trying to eliminate four and five bedroom homes, but we do need things that fit that flexible need and that affordable need in the housing market.

I also believe in mixed-use development. I think that our zoning bylaws have really portioned out mixed-use to just the downtown and Old Town, and I think we’re missing an opportunity in our existing subdivisions – and hopefully in the new ones – to have mixed-use development and mixed-use zoning so people can start a home-based business. For example, you can have a corner store around the corner from where you actually live, you can have a nail salon in your basement, you can start a daycare.

What do you see as city council’s role for making those changes?

Redoing the zoning bylaws is a huge thing that we do have the tools to do and that is something that’s on the table coming up in the next session. Beyond that, as we look at new developments like Frame Lake North, this is a really great opportunity for the city to make sure that we get it right. We all want to make sure that the trail stays intact, we want to make sure that the naturalized zone between the lake and the trail stays intact. I’d like to take that one further and, north of our existing Frame Lake Trail, have nice parkland, have something that the community can all use that’s accessible to everybody throughout the town.

Then have a small two-way street, and beyond that, on the north side of that street, have an opportunity to have a main street with main street style businesses, your cafe, your corner store, your small pharmacy. These sorts of local businesses that are on your main street level with apartments above, bringing the community to the Frame Lake North subdivision. Then beyond that, having cul-de-sacs that feature your duplexes, your triplexes, your single-family homes.

How do you plan on working with other councillors on bringing some of these ideas to fruition?

You look at the 21 candidates and it’s a huge candidate pool. All of us are looking at the issues on the table from different perspectives. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned how to do in my years of being a bartender, it’s getting people with different points of view chatting with each other. I’m not a developer, but I am a bridge builder, and if I can get two or four or six or all eight counselors together at the table focusing on the same matter at hand, then I’d think that my job is a success.

You also told me that you wanted to talk about the arts. What do you believe is the most important aspect of this issue?

First of all, we need more performing arts spaces. We do have a couple of stages in bars. We have the beautiful Northern Arts and Cultural Centre. Similarly to missing middle housing, there’s a missing middle in performance spaces. I’d love to see a small, 75 to 150 person black-box theatre somewhere like the Ruth Inch Memorial Pool. There’s been a lot of talk about putting a performance space in there. I really think that’s a great opportunity. I think it would complement putting a library in there really nicely as well, but also it becomes a revenue stream.

Not only is there a lack of performance spaces in town, but also rehearsal spaces. A rehearsal space is really an easy thing to build and you can charge good money for it. Not to say that artists have a ton of money available to them, but they do know how to spend it when they need it. More than anything, a rehearsal space for bands, for theatre performances, for dance troupes, etc. That would be vital to the arts community.

What would be your first step?

The first step is getting the funding out there for artists to do what they need to do. Also, there’s a lot of things that need to be done to the Ruth Annual Memorial Pool to put anything into that building. So obviously, the first step is a bunch of engineering studies.

Beyond that, I would say building the performance space is your lowest barrier to entry. Once you’ve decided that you’re going to use the space for that, putting up four walls and some sound baffling, is something that you can do in a weekend and that can easily make you $400 in a weekend. So that’s a great opportunity to use that space right off the hop.

What do you think can be done to improve downtown revitalization?

That’s a great segue with arts. What I’d love to see is the city going and incentivizing downtown businesses to give or lease or sell some of their blank wall spaces to mural artists. I don’t want to sound trite, but I think the city has the opportunity to be more Instagramable, and I do hate that buzzword, but it’s true. When it comes down to it, we like spending time in spaces that are beautiful, and we have so many talented artists in the city. Leveraging that, using those artists, helping them make a city that, at a glance, looks nice, will help us build a city that, deep down, also reflects that.

I saw on your Facebook campaign page a way that you thought the city could cover the cost of revitalization. Can you tell me more about that?

The city currently charges a four percent tourism accommodation tax, which is great. As someone who deals with the tourists through this city every day, I promise you that the vast majority of the tourists that are coming to Yellowknife from abroad can absolutely afford four percent. I’d like to go one further and add an extra percentage. I’d like to earmark that extra percentage and I’d like to see how much of the four percent we’re using on downtown revitalization projects.

I’d love to see the 50/50 lot getting developed into a civic plaza. Based on 100,000 tourists coming through per year, spending three nights on average, spending $250 on average – these are all conservative estimates – that comes out to $750,000 a year just from that one percent. That $750,000 can go a long way, both towards civic plaza-type big projects, but also making sure that we have something like a downtown ambassador program. I think this is a really great boots-on-the-ground way to get the tourists and residents feeling more comfortable in our downtown space, and that really does include our most vulnerable residents as well.

I saw this program in Austin, Texas a few years back, but it’s also in Ottawa. These downtown ambassadors, they’re well marked, they’ve got a broom and a dustpan, they’re tidying up cigarette butts and other detritus around. But more than that, they’re de-escalation trained. So if somebody’s having a crisis, they’ve got direct access to MED, to RCMP, to Line Drive Outreach, and they’re there to be the helper. One thing that I noticed when I was in Austin, when you’d see somebody in a state of crisis, the first reaction of most empathetic people is to look for the helper. If they can’t see one immediately, the onus falls on them to be that helper.

Having someone that’s available, that is clearly marked as that helper takes the onus off of the tourists for sure, but also the residents. There’s a lot of people in our vulnerable sector when they’re in crisis, they just need to be heard and they just need to be seen and they just need to be validated. Having a de-escalation trained downtown ambassador is someone who can do that and I think that’s a really easy way to make a marked difference for our downtown.

Speaking of tourism, what do you think is the future of tourism in Yellowknife?

The future is so bright for tourism. We were seeing 100,000 tourists a year before [Covid-19] and we’ve officially bounced back to pre-Covid numbers when it comes to our annual tourism. You’ve got new hotels being built as we speak. The Explorer expansion took about two years start to finish to do, so I know that as long as we stay out of developers’ way as a city and let them build how they need to build, we’ll absolutely get these tourists here.

People really love coming in the summer. Hunting and fishing tourism is still huge. In spite of trade wars, you still have a ton of Americans that come up every year and they love the city. We have the opportunity to meet them where they’re at, but we also have the opportunity to improve. I’d love to see better lighting and trail access. I’d love to see more businesses go and start tourism-friendly activities.

This is a great time to start that private karaoke bar. This is a great time to start a craft business where you’re giving lessons on beading and tufting. The tourists are looking for experiences, and we have so much knowledge and so much creativity and so much get-up-and-go in this city, that I really think that we really could be doing so much more to bring tourists into this town and to show them a great time while they’re here.

Just to get a little bit more specific, what do you feel City Council can do to achieve this?

We can set out a mandate of, for example, cut back the brushes on the trail, put up better signage, make the tourist experience of getting around this town a little bit easier. Tin Can Hill is a beautiful piece of land and we should be sharing this. But I’ll be damned if it isn’t hard to find. We have such easy opportunities to make that experience just a little bit more seamless, not just for tourists, but also for new residents, for existing residents.

Beyond that, we can incentivize businesses, like having a tax abatement for businesses that are going to open up downtown.

Why should people vote for you?

You should vote for me because I have a boundless optimism for this city. I love this place, and I think we all love it too. We are sitting at the cusp of this moment and we have the opportunity to meet it.

It’s so easy to get bogged down in the gloom and doom of “my taxes are too high, and the mines are closing, who would want to live here, and the downtown sucks.” But these things only suck because we stop caring about them. And I’ll tell you that I have a limitless capacity to care about this place.

I know when I’m not the smartest person in the room, I know how to listen to the smartest person in the room, and I know that the smartest person in the room oftentimes isn’t the loudest person in the room. I’m excited to do the research, I’m excited to dig into the hard work, and I’m excited to lead the city in this next chapter.