Shortly after Willard Phelps raised the alarm about the possible privatization of the Yukon's public energy utility, he made clear his belief that the only people who could truly hold Premier Dennis Fentie accountable for his secretive talks with energy giant ATCO were the elected members of the Yukon Party.

At a public meeting held in Dawson City last month, Phelps said it was up to the ruling party's MLAs to stand up for Yukoners and cross the floor to sit as independents, thus depriving Fentie of his majority.

So it wasn't difficult to predict what he would have to say about Energy, Mines and Resources Minister Brad Cathers' surprise resignation this morning.

"I was quite delighted to hear that," the long-time conservative player told the Star from his Carcross home today.

"I'd heard from somebody in the media that (Cathers) was overheard talking to somebody about possibly becoming the leader. If that's true, he must have gotten hell from Fentie."

Phelps - who has worked to keep the privatization story alive in the face of Fentie's stream of denials of any wrong doing - said today he was never totally comfortable with Fentie's membership in the party.

"It was really the Langs that put him in," Phelps said of Fentie's entry into the Yukon Party's leadership race before the 2002 election.

"Nobody really knew who Fentie was when he came in; he was just some guy from Watson Lake. I'd never even met him."

Fentie was a backbencher in former NDP government leader Piers McDonald's 1996-2000 regime.

In spite of strong support from Yukon Party cabinet minister Archie and now-Yukon Senator Dan Lang, Phelps said he wasn't the only one who questioned Fentie's motives.

"A lot of people had doubts and misgiving about a guy that would cross the floor from the NDP, a left-leaning party, to a centre-right party," he said, adding that most concerns came from the party's "old guard".

"They feel disillusioned for the most part," he said of the people who formed the conservative Yukon Party in the early '90s from the former Yukon Territorial Progressive Conservative Party. That party formed governments between 1978 and 1985.

"Anybody who was active in the beginning, they're all upset with what has happened," Phelps said.

But the current party members are "pretty much divorced" from the founding members, Phelps said. They have kept silent about Fentie's behaviour, which Phelps and now Cathers calls bullying, disrespectful and dishonest.

Yukon Party president Linda Hillier told the Star early this afternoon she will not comment on Cathers' resignation nor party issues until she has met with the premier and the party's executive.