DAWSON CITY Antony David John Penikett, hereinafter known as Tony, hasn't quite got enough distance from his time in Yukon politics to produce the book that those who lived here from 1978 to 1992, when he was a major player, have been waiting for.

'Someday, I'm going to get back to the Yukon and do a book on Yukon politics, but it'll take me awhile,' he said after his book reading in Dawson on Wednesday evening.

'It's something I've been thinking about that I might want to do.'

There is a 2005 collection of essays and memories called Breaking Trail (Trafford, 2005) that might be seen as a prologue to that book

Penikett, who grew up in Dawson and once worked at the defunct Clinton Creek mine before entering politics, heads up Tony Penikett Negotiations Inc. in Vancouver. He also teaches a course each April as part of the Public Policy Program at that city's Simon Fraser University.

'They're very good to me. Because I travel so much they let me teach eight hours a day for four weeks in April. It's the last course the students take in the program.'

His business is largely involved with mediation and facilitation these days, though he does do a little negotiating.

'I have two negotiating files left,' said the 62-year-old ex-premier.

'I negotiate for the Nunavut government on oil and gas devolution, and in Vancouver I negotiate for the Vancouver Symphony musicians, who are brilliant people getting wages below the poverty level.'

Aside from that, he doesn't actually do a lot of work in Vancouver, choosing to live there because it's where his adult children reside. He travels a lot.

'This past year, I've been to the Middle East, Washington, D.C., the Eastern Arctic and frequently to Ottawa. In slightly longer periods, I've been to Latin America, Hungary and London.'

His latest book, Reconciliation, deals with his years observing the treaty-making process in British Columbia.

Thinking about his Yukon experience with land claims, he chuckled.

'I'm enough of a writer to appreciate the delicious irony of having the final land claims agreement signed by people who fought it basically all the way for 20 years.

'It's wonderful, maybe appropriate in a kind of novelistic way.'

Of the Yukon experience, which has often been cited as the most progressive in the country, he maintains a quiet pride.

'We kind of invented where self-government was going to go in the Yukon, We had no templates. We had nothing. No models. The fact that it's had some problems in implementation doesn't surprise me at all.

'The big challenge is whether the model is exportable to places where there are huge challenges, like in Latin America or Australia.'

Penikett believes there have been many positive changes since he left the territory, and said he could see them coming even while living here.

'When my son went to school, he didn't have a single Yukon-born teacher. By the time my daughters went to school, just seven years later, most of their teachers were Yukon-born and a sizable number were first nations.'

In the past few months, he's found himself meeting more and more first nations success stories. In Washington, he met a young Tahltan woman who had grown up in Whitehorse and was finishing her Ph.D. at M.I.T..

'Recently, on a mediation, I met two first nation physicians, one of whom was born in the Yukon. Then I met a Kaska chartered accountant who was working in London.'

'Things can change,' he said.

There is another book in the works, but he's reluctant to talk about it at this point.

'Not 'til I get it accepted and out the door, but it's on a totally different subject.'