Riding Profile - Yukon

The Yukon is the most distant riding from Ottawa. The population is only 34,000 (much smaller than almost all ridings) but the riding – which shares boundaries with the Northwest Territories, British Columbia and Alaska– is nearly 500,000 square kilometers. Canvassing the riding on foot is not really an option…

John Streicker, the GPC candidate for the Yukon, has been working on climate change and adaptation for twenty years as a consultant, professional engineer, and teacher. He also writes for the Encyclopedia Britannica, co-edits the local newsletter, and has had a book about his quilting work published. He’s a great candidate: well-rounded, confident in public, tireless, charismatic, and committed to GPC values and policies.

In the 2008 election John earned 12.8% of the vote in the Yukon. The campaign was based in Whitehorse, and it started early. Canvassing began well before the writ dropped. Printed brochures, advertisements, signs, and websites were ready-to-go. All of the campaign materials connected the Green Party with things John’s potential voters valued very much: the gorgeous scenery, rugged mountains, rich river valleys, and resourceful inhabitants (animal and human) of the Yukon itself.

The campaign had to be creative and inventive; they ended up spending $16,000, while the Liberals and Conservatives ran fully-funded campaigns. John’s campaign printed their large signs on recycled hockey puck-board and encouraged non-partisan groups to organize debates. John is an experienced public speaker, but he and his team prepared for debates carefully. They established a great rapport with the media by initiating contact and providing solid content. They had respectful relations with the other candidates, who all came by the Green Party campaign headquarters on election night. Overall, they set themselves apart by running a positive campaign: as John says, “We ran our campaign on vision and on issues, in contrast to the other teams that ran on fear and on personal attacks.”

Good preparation of both the big picture and the little details are key to campaign success. There are resources to help you under “Campaign Planning” in the Campaign Zone section of the website. Here’s something you can do right now:

• Find census information about your riding from Statistics Canada. Begin with “2006 Community Profiles” homepage and type the name of your community.
• Click on “Select another region” to compare your community to the nation as a whole.
• Use the drop-down menu at the top to change the topic of the data that you can see.

If you like, add information from Elections Canada’s application of selected data from the 2001 census data to your riding area to the information you can get from Statistics Canada. With this information you can model your voter coalition, which will be probably be comprised of several groups (which may well have little else in common and may not even know that they all vote Green!).

In the Yukon the population predominantly has English as a mother-tongue (higher than the national average). It is comprised of about 25% aboriginal persons. People in the Yukon have slightly higher levels of education than the national norm, and there are significantly higher incidences of common-law and lone-parent families than in Canada as a whole.

These are only a few of the hundreds of insights that are available about the Yukon in the Statistics Canada data. With this sort of information about your community, you can pull together a profile of your voter coalition, which will help to shape your strategy (including where you place ads, who you ask to stage an all-candidates meeting, and what languages you get campaign materials translated into) and policy emphases.

The Yukon is one of the Green Party of Canada’s strongest ridings. With a hard-working and out-going candidate, an active campaign team, and sound strategy, the results for the GPC in this riding will only get better.