With a dash of humour, federal Green Party Leader Elizabeth May launched the party's Arctic Strategy on Friday, during her weekend visit to Whitehorse.

"I just want to make it clear to media that at this press conference you are allowed to ask questions," said May while standing in front of Yukon Green Party headquarters on Wood Street.

An hour earlier, at a media event featuring Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the PM virtually ignored local media, taking just four questions - three of which came from members of a national media pool who shadowed Harper on his five-day "Arctic Sovereignty" tour.

"I thought it would be useful to get that out of the way, in case you were under any misapprehensions that we don't like spontaneity, interface with people, questions, that's all good," she added, earning a laugh from gathered reporters.

But May quickly shifted to a more serious tone as she blasted the federal government for its failure to live up to obligations made to Canada's aboriginal people.

"It's important for Canadians from coast to coast to know that the modern day treaties are not being any better implemented than the historic treaties about which we're now ashamed," said May, fresh from a meeting with Council of Yukon First Nations' chiefs.

The implementation is unacceptably slow, May continued, citing key agreements to hasten closure to deals inked under the Umbrella Final Agreement, "just sit unimplemented."

"All the rhetoric has improved, but the performance has not improved by the Government of Canada ... in the last hundred years and that is shocking."

May then turned her scorn towards the Conservative government's policies for improving the lives of northerners by asserting its claims to the land and water in the Arctic archipelago.

"It clearly focuses on resource exploitation and sovereignty expressed through military presence," May said.

"In our view, Canada's sovereignty ... is best exemplified by commitment to communities, to environmental protection in the Arctic, to paying attention to being a constant presence in the region.

"Our best evidence of sovereignty in international courts is the use and occupation of these territories over millennia by people of first nations and by the Inuit," said May, a lawyer by trade who helped found the Sierra Club of Canada and headed that organization for nearly 20 years.

The Green Party leader said any development in Canada's North must "involve full engagement" of aboriginal people inhabiting the region.

May said that receding sea ice in the Arctic should not be viewed solely as a resource extraction opportunity.

"There is of course deep irony in that because the Western Arctic is one of the regions most impacted, most seriously by the climate crisis," she said. "And the effort to get at more fossil fuels and burn them suffers under a dangerous delusion of the nature of the crisis and what our response should be."

Under its Arctic policy, the Green Party believes the Arctic Council - an intergovernmental forum established in 1996 that promotes cooperation among the Arctic states - should formulate international policy on how the region is managed, particularly resource exploitation, and guide any new circumpolar treaties Arctic states may sign in the future.

"We think that's the proper vehicle and we think the need to have an international consultation on what kind of regime makes sense for the Arctic should've begun some time ago," May said.

"And have in our minds something like the common heritage of mankind in terms of how Antarctica is being treated and we take some lessons from that and move forward to ensure the protection of Arctic environment while investing seriously in ways that have not been done in improving community health throughout the region."