More than 1,500 submissions have been filed on the hotly-contested draft land use plan for the Peel River watershed.

The three affected first nations and Yukon government have until July 31 to file theirs.

The commission is expected to release its final recommendation sometime around the middle of this fall.

It will largely be up to the government to accept, reject or alter the recommended plan, as 97 per cent of the planning area is territorial Crown land.

Statistics provided by the commission today show that as of the June 30 deadline for public submissions, there were:

• 1,471 written submissions from individual members of the public;

• 11 responses to the questionnaire posted by the commission;

• 64 submissions by what the commission is calling stakeholder organizations, like the Yukon Chamber of Mines and the Yukon Conservation Society.

The final draft of the land use plan under consideration has created two, very distinct and vocal camps: those in favour of protecting the watershed, which many believe is one of the last pristine tracts of wilderness; and those who maintain the mining and oil and gas industries are a necessary part of the economy and modern day life, and should be allowed to work responsibly in the resource-rich area.

Meanwhile, the government is refusing to turn over documents that many suggest were suppressed by political interference, and should have been forwarded to the commission for its consideration.

Copies of e-mail exchanges among senior bureaucrats last March suggest the government whittled down 22 pages of analysis on the first three draft plans to four pages after an "irate" phone call from Premier Denis Fentie to the deputy minister of Environment Yukon.

Denis Senger, the spokesman for Environment Yukon, said the documents will not be provided to the commission because they were always meant to be internal information to help form the government's official submission.

He noted they are available online through a third party who sought them through the access-to-information process, but the government will not be releasing them to the commission, despite its request for them.

Besides, said Senger, government staff have been working closely with the planning commission for five years, and nothing in those documents would be anything new to members of the commission or its staff.

If that's the case, and if there's nothing new to see, commissioner David Loeks asked in an interview Friday, why not forward the documents as requested?

Loeks said the commission had not yet received an official rejection of its request.

It was harshly critical of the government when it learned it did not receive all the information Environment Yukon had prepared in its review of the the first three land use options.

Input on the three options was used by the commission to help develop the final draft plan, for which public comment closed last Tuesday.

The commission wrote the government asking for the full 22 pages of documentation, and stressing the importance of keeping political interference out of the land use planning process, which was established under Yukon aboriginal land claims.

Loeks said he has seen the full 22 pages online. It would be nice, he suggested, to have Environment Yukon provide the information officially.

The commissioner agreed the government's four-page summary provided to the commission after Fentie's phone call did not capture the more critical analysis of the three draft options provided by Environment Yukon's parks department.

The premier has defended his phone call as merely ensuring the government departments did not breach the government's obligations as set out in the Umbrella Final Agreement.