The City of Whitehorse has yet to ask for territorial funding to assist with the latest landslide, Community Services Minister Richard Mostyn said Tuesday afternoon. 

“I was on the phone with the mayor of Whitehorse (Laura Cabott) first thing Saturday morning to reach out and extend my offers of help,” Mostyn told reporters.

“They said that they didn’t need anything at this time, but we are working with the City of Whitehorse on an ongoing basis.”

In April 2022, when a massive slide took out another section of Robert Service Way, the Yukon government gave the city $2 million to offset the damages and help in the cleanup and remediation work.

Of the $2 million given last year, Mostyn said, the city still has some left over, and the government will continue to help this year as the issue evolves. 

Earlier, in the House, Yukon Party Leader Currie Dixon raised concerns around funding for the cleanup of Robert Service Way, whose closure has significantly disrupted the lives of many Yukoners, he said. 

“According to the budget speech, the 2023-24 budget includes a new — quote — ‘$50-million contingency fund for emerging priorities, including wildfires and flooding.’” 

“It is hard to think of a more fitting emergency situation than this,” Dixon said.

“Ongoing natural disasters have cut off one of the busiest — if not the busiest — transportation arteries in the Yukon, and, according to the mayor of our capital city, a longer-term engineering solution is needed,” he told the House. 

Premier Ranj Pillai said the contingency fund is good to have in place, considering the acts of climate change Yukoners have seen. 

“We now see that there is an understanding that this (landslides) is a potential risk. There is an understanding that it is important to work with the City of Whitehorse, which we did all last year,” Pillai said. 

Dixon told reporters the Yukon Party is looking for assurance from the government about a long-term solution.

“It’s pretty clear from the mayor’s comments (Tuesday) morning that the mayor and the City of Whitehorse feel that there needs to be a longer-term solution to this than simply cleaning up the clay and carrying on isn’t going to work. We need to establish some sort of longer-term plan,” he said. 

Mostyn told reporters the budget’s contingency fund will deal with things that are “acts of God.

“The $50-million contingency fund that we have in the budget this year is to deal with fires, floods and things like landslides that are acts of God. They come out of nowhere and we need money to deal with them,” the minister said.

“We have no idea what the flood costs are going to be this year. We have no idea what the fire costs are going to be this year.

“And that money is there to fight fires, fight floods, and to deal with landslides when they come down,” Mostyn said. 

He also said the contingency fund wouldn’t be used for infrastructure expenses like building. 

“This is a new approach to funding this type of thing. We haven’t had a contingency like this in the past, so we’ll work with that,” Mostyn said. 

“But it would be things like remediation, putting in a culvert, if something was washed out, perhaps putting a temporary barrier in place might help with those costs.”  

In terms of future costs and talk of a permanent solution, Mostyn said officials are working closely with municipal partners such as Dawson City, Carmacks, Mayo, Haines Junction, Teslin, Watson Lake and Whitehorse as they deal with crises. At this time, however, it’s unclear what the costs look like. 

Mostyn told reporters the Yukon Geological Survey has been working very closely with the city motioning slides and the potential of slides.   

“The city has also hired a consultant and engineering consultant to look at the entire clay cliffs structure. So they’ve been working on that too,” Mostyn said. 

Dixon noted that according to the Yukon Geological Survey, more landslides are to be expected this year. 

NDP Leader Kate White told reporters she hopes to see how the government will support the city after the most recent mudslide, but it wasn’t one of the topics. 

“My expectation is that the Yukon government fully support the City of Whitehorse and whatever decisions they feel like they have to make in order to make sure that Robert Service Way stays a viable transportation route,” she said.

To give people an idea of the amount of mud movement, White noted that White Pass and Yukon railway tracks were built under the cliff decades ago, but aren’t visible now. 

“For people who are new to the Yukon and didn’t know there’s actually train tracks that run under-neath that, but you wouldn’t know that because they’ve been covered for such a long time,” she said. 

“But when I was a kid, that’s where the train tracks went. And so to give you an idea of how much movement there’s been there, you can’t see those tracks anymore.” 

White Pass train service between Skagway and Whitehorse was suspended in 1982.

“So this has been an ongoing issue for a long number of years,” White said.

“But what we’re seeing now is that it’s really starting to affect the ability to drive on that road.”