As reported in Wednesday’s Star, Mayor Laura Cabott said she has received notification that the Canada Games Council is moving on from Whitehorse’s 2027 Canada Winter Games bid.

The Star spoke with Community Services Minister Richard Mostyn Thursday to glean his perceptions of what happened during the past several weeks and why.

“The City of Whitehorse and I had discussed what I’m calling an acoustic version or an unplugged version of the Canada Games once the Canada Games Council relaxed all of its conditions to host the Games in Whitehorse,” recalled Mostyn.

“As I said in our interview (Monday), there’s no rink needed – all they needed was housing.”

Mostyn said he met with the City of Whitehorse last week and followed up with a letter to the city before the past weekend.

Mostyn said he continued to go back and forth with the city on a stripped-down version of the Games bid.

He said he phoned Kelly-Ann Paul at the Canada Games Council on Monday to tell her the city and territory were discussing how Whitehorse still might be able to host the Games in 2027. On Tuesday afternoon, though, Mostyn said he received an email from the city, rejecting the bid.

“They could not proceed with the Games without any tangible recreation infrastructure,” Mostyn said, speaking of the removal of the Takhini Arena upgrades from the stripped down bid. 

According to Mostyn, he sent an email to Paul on Wednesday morning “informing her that we would not be proceeding with the Canada Games bid now that I had my response from the City of Whitehorse.” He told Paul he’d send a formal letter by Friday, rescinding the bid.

“So that’s the process that I’ve been following,” he said.

“I’ve been in touch with the Canada Games Council the whole time.”

Mostyn added that he wanted to wait to see if the City of Whitehorse could proceed without recreational infrastructure funding included in the bid.

Mostyn said he told the Canada Games Council the bid was dead the morning after the city responded that it needed that infrastructure. 

“They know what their citizens need,” Mostyn said. “I respect that.”

Mostyn confirmed the email from the city stated that an arena upgrade was required by the city. 

“It was a letter from the City of Whitehorse to me stating that they could not go forward with the Games without some sort of retrofit to the arena in Takhini.

“The Yukon government was proposing we host a really scaled-back bid with no recreational infrastructure but housing.”

That would have required about $60 million of funding, Mostyn said, and the Yukon government thought it still might be able to get that money from Ottawa, but the rink upgrades were too much.

Mostyn doesn’t think the situation has damaged relations between YG and the city. 

“Absolutely not. Not from my point of view, for sure. I am in regular contact with the mayor, with mayors across the territory, but certainly with the mayor of Whitehorse,” he said. “We talk certainly every week, sometimes every two weeks.”

Mostyn was asked if he’s concerned that the fallout from the bid cancellation may be seen as the fault of the Yukon government. He said the government did all it could to refine the bid and make it successful, with hard work coming from both the territory and the city on the joint bid.

“We’ve met the conditions put on us by the Canada Games Council for a fourth ice sheet in that bid. We also strived to accommodate the City of Whitehorse’s needs on behalf of their citizens.”

But still, the federal government couldn’t commit, he said, prompting the decision to pull out.

“I made the responsible financial decision for all Yukoners that we couldn’t go ahead and support the bid that we’d submitted to the Canada Games Council on our own.” 

Mostyn appeared to have a tough time answering when he was asked if anything could have been done differently.

“I’ll be reflecting on this whole Canada Games situation, personally for many years to come,” he responded.

“When planning for an event like the Canada Games is not successful, I think it behooves all governments to reflect and find out what we could have done better.

“But at this time, I don’t have a good answer for that.”

He said his department will be doing a review with the City of Whitehorse, and likely the bid’s other partners, to find what could’ve been improved.

In an interview Wednesday, the mayor Cabott said, “I think there’s some misunderstanding that maybe the city was asking for too much but the city has done everything that it’s been required to do as per Canada Games Council.”

She called the city’s $11-million commitment to the bid “a significant amount of money for a jurisdiction our size.” But there was always the expectation that more funding would come for lasting infrastructure, she said.

“The big piece there is … the municipality that hosts it is always left with a significant legacy piece and it’s what the city needs,” Cabott said.

She noted Newfoundland and Labrador will have multiple recreational facilities after the 2025 Games, and P.E.I. will have the same after next year’s Games. A prime example of the legacy infrastructure the Games can provide, she said, is found right here in the Yukon.

“We got the Canada Games Centre, and that was a game changer for this city.”

Cabott asserted that with all the time and money invested, the city needed to see a significant return.

She said the Games would have cost the taxpayers a “significant amount of money,” and that the city would require something in exchange for that investment. 

“We needed that extra rink and we needed that court space,” she said. “We went all the way down to just an upgrade to Takhini Arena. That has fallen on deaf ears.”

Cabott said the city was not prepared to commit more funding to the bid, saying the $11 million already committed is about equal to the total revenue the city takes in annually.

She said that commitment is similar to what the city offered for the 2007 Games, adjusting for inflation.

“We are the smallest jurisdiction ever to host the Games. We don’t have a lot of funds there and our budget compared to YG’s is about seven per cent,” she said, calling the city’s funding offer “quite reasonable.

“And then everything else that we would have contributed: staff time, facilities, transit, etc.

“And the other thing is YG hasn’t hosted an event like this before. The City of Whitehorse has hosted events like this; we know how to do it.

“We have the people, we have infrastructure. We have the templates. 2007 was a remarkable Games. People still talk about it. We know how to do games, we’ve done Arctic Winter Games, so we would have brought a lot of value to hosting.” 

Cabott said the pulled bid doesn’t make the Yukon look good, putting the Canada Games Council “in a bad spot” and disappointing athletes and sports organizations.

“The bid committee has put all this time and effort into a fantastic bid and we’re left with nothing,” she said. “The City of Whitehorse moved quite a bit and as far as we could move.”

Meanwhile, to no one’s surprise, the Yukon Party isn’t impressed with the territorial government’s performance with the Games bid.

In a press release issued Thursday afternoon, the YP stated “This failure falls squarely at the feet of Community Services Minister Richard Mostyn and the territorial Liberal government. 

“The decision to pull the Yukon bid to host the 2027 Canada Winter Games startled everyone involved and Yukoners have been left scratching their heads about how we got here.”

See party’s letter in today’s Opinion section.