Dennis Fentie is spending his last full day as premier with a couple of homeless, disillusioned Yukoners camping outside his windows amid a sopping cluster of heavy construction equipment.

The scene serves as an unfortunate metaphor to his tempestuous 8 1/2 years in office – and furnishes a somewhat alarming welcoming party for his successor.

The gruff-speaking ex-trucker parks a legacy of a confident, aggressive, and highly polarizing figure who never did things any way but his own – the boisterous political and polling consequences be damned.

Considering how he reassembled a broken life and barrelled forward after serving time for narcotics peddling in the 1970s, the departing premier has indeed penned a profile of gutsy resolve.

Fentie the offender could easily have succumbed to the miseries of letting foolish youthful mistakes forever stain and cripple his professional and personal lives.

Instead, in 2002, he presented himself for an office which only 13 people across Canada can simultaneously hold and secured a resounding victory, which he duplicated in 2006.

He did so even after his criminal past was revealed during the '02 election campaign. Such a feat would eclipse the reach of the faint of heart, and those whose powers of political persuasion are timid and tentative.

The premier's guidance of his tenure's most explosive crisis – his alleged interest in privatizing all or parts of the Yukon Energy Corp. – was hardly an exercise in political mastery – which he eventually candidly admitted.

Two summers ago, grievously wounded by the stunning defection of sidekick Brad Cathers over that affair; figuratively tackled by the stampede of resigning corporation board members; and assaulted by the revelation his energy minister was poised to quit amid all the anger, Fentie stubbornly insisted all these people were wrong.

He repeatedly voiced a highly selective version of the facts, but many weren't buying it. That flaming fiasco sparked a head-long cascade in the polls from which his party has only begun to emerge.

Still, partial personal vindication may one day materialize when the corporation's future masters concede that major infrastructure investments can only occur with the partnership of private sector interests.

Curiously, neither Fentie nor his handlers ever seemed to make a strident effort to portray the most positive characteristics of his persona, a missed opportunity which may well have hastened the end of his career.

Anecdotes about his forboding temper would squirt out from behind sealed doors from time to time, partly based on fact, partly on fiction or hearsay.

Yet, one of the most impressive speeches of his career, when he addressed Yukon Party delegates in 2010 and gamely absorbed responsibility for the party's severe image difficulties, was delivered behind closed doors.

The realization that a humble, public mea culpa from time to time can bring a politician down to the common person's identity seemed to perennially confront a baffling strategical resistance.

The premier's emotional visits to former NDP MLA Todd Hardy, as he lay in a Vancouver hospital battling the cancer which killed him 10 1/2 months ago, were an example of gestures which always bobbed under the public's radar – not that Fentie intentionally set out to exploit them.

Instead, the premier's image was too often framed by his critics' unflattering recountings of his conduct, such as how he bellowed at a government manager over the management of the Peel River watershed; and how Fentie, as the veritable lion tamer, kept his ministers meekly in line with a savage crack of the whip where needed.

Sometimes, his troubles were self-authored, such as his thuggish on-air scolding of CBC Yukon's Nancy Thomson over her stories about substance abuse in Watson Lake.

Publicly villified as a dictator by former party leader Willard Phelps, Fentie accentuated that image with the ham-fisted firing of Jim Kenyon, a measure the premier never publicly rationalized. Surely, his legendary thick skin was impervious to Kenyon's uncharitable reviews of his boss's conduct!

The successes of his years at the top are undeniable: tremendous strides in infrastructure which are helping nourish today's mining and exploration rush; improvements in a range of social programs, including social assistance rates; key economic development and health care funding deals with Ottawa by working in unison with the other territories; and virtually no tax increases.

The downsides have yielded tales of incurring a half-century of government corporation debt for power generation infrastructure and community hospitals which won't provide many crucial Whitehorse General services, and for power generation development.

With the grim reality of troubled youth and others of less fortunate classes fitfully slumbering in tents or beside the Yukon River, Fentie dims the office lights still having failed to discuss Kenyon's accusation that $17.5 million of affordable housing money from Ottawa has sat idle for five years.

The number of times the leadership candidates emphasized they would bring consultation and

conciliation to the top job translated into a subtle, embarrassing rebuke of the modus operandi of the last 8 1/2 years.

And so, the man who was once feted in Watson Lake for using a bat to vandalize a vehicle after a bar brawl now picks up that impliment of sport and moseys off the field.

The nature of the private life he will re-embrace remains devoid of any public definition, but will surely involve bonanza-sized bevies of beer, baseball and bravado.

Pumped by his triumphs, chastened by his miscalculations and bearing the painful bruisings and bastings of a lengthy political life, Fentie shall claim a page of premium importance in the territory's annals of history.

For his considerable dedication in becoming the nation's longest-serving leader, he deserves thanks – even if it's served with a hesitant dash of wariness and relief.