DAWSON CITY – Klondike Liberals are very happy with their MLA, and wasted no time confirming Liberal Leader Sandy Silver for the coming territorial election.

The meeting was held Sunday evening at Dawson’s Yukon College campus, and attracted seven members of the local group.

Mark Wickham chaired the meeting, at which the only formal business was the confirmation of Silver’s continuing candidacy. That took one minute and 15 seconds, after which Silver spoke briefly.

“What a long five years it’s been since the last nomination meeting,” he said.

At that time, he was just the Klondike candidate and eventually one of two Liberal voices in the legislature.

Since then, the party has lost one member, Darius Elias, to the Yukon Party, and Silver has become a very busy Liberal leader.

Silver sees the local group as not being particularly partisan in its politics, something which he feels helped to get him elected.

He has been striving to hit the middle of the political spectrum in his candidate recruiting so far, with people from both left and right of centre signing on.

The lacklustre federal leadership of the day didn’t help the Liberals much then, and the local group went with the idea that “we were going to represent the Klondike in Whitehorse, and campaign on that.

“I think it really resonated from door-to-door.”

Silver won that contest handily, but admits that he and his party were a bit naïve about what they could hope to accomplish.

Familiar with the frustrations of dealing with government as a teacher, Silver was to learn that the same kinds of frustrations were to be found in all government departments.

Building policy into a coherent and communicable party platform is something he’s been enjoying.

Seeing broad philosophical notions rendered down to bite-sized pieces is great when the pieces fit well with the original ideas, he said.

Silver spoke at some length about the need to reduce the role of partisan politics and political interference in the way government runs.

From his point of view, it infects every level of the current Yukon Party government.

He’s a little more vague about what non-partisan governance would look like, but does talk about non-whipped votes on non-budgetary issues and the importance of having members vote for their constituencies ahead of voting for their parties.

“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us this summer, and I’m thrilled to death with the level of the volunteers,” Silver said.

“Starting with five people five years ago, right now the Liberal Party has over 100 active volunteers working right now. It’s unbelievable the content that we’re getting.”

Aside from news media questions, there was mostly appreciation being expressed by the membership and the meeting broke up after about 30 minutes.

So far, there has been no word on Klondike candidates from the Yukon Party nor the NDP.