A Bit More Detail

CBC's Paul Haavardsrud wrote at the beginning of the month how Canada's northern Yukon Territory wants to make its autonomous government a potent selling factor for business, by making Yukon a preferred place to incorporate businessses. Leveraging its sovereign jurisdiction in this way could work: Look at Delaware.

What do a Chilean mining company, an Illinois-based pharmaceutical firm that just sold for $12.8 billion, and a gold producer from Colorado operating in Turkey have in common?

They're all registered in Yukon.

That Alacer Gold, Catamaran, or Orosur Mining don't do any work in the territory is a quirk of Canadian regulatory history that Yukon wants to make less of an oddity. So today, Yukon is changing its Business Corporations Act in a bid to convince even more far-flung companies that part of the answer to tapping Canada's capital markets can be found north of 60.

"If you want to send a message to the business community that this is a good place to come, what better way to say it than you've got really good business legislation," says Paul Lackowicz, a partner at Lackowicz & Hoffman, a Whitehorse law firm.

[. . .]

How much of a difference can some esoteric changes to business legislation really make? For a province like Ontario or Alberta, not much at all. But for a remote locale with a population of only 36,500, even a little economic activity can move the needle.

In that regard, Yukon is in the same boat as Delaware, a tiny state that's so amenable to business that nearly half of the public companies in the United States are incorporated there. Yukon's regulatory changes don't include tax benefits, so no one should expect it to become Delaware North.

Registering for a business licence in a jurisdiction is also different than incorporating there as a legal entity. Still, in a sparsely populated territory that raised its employment rate 2.1 percentage points in 2013 by adding an extra 400 jobs, even changes at the margin can matter.

In a guest post at Spacing, writer Tim Falconer discusses his perception of the problems of Dawson City, a municipality in the Yukon famous for its origins in the Klondike Gold Rush.

This is not a love letter to Dawson City, though I certainly could have written one of those. After all, the Yukon town is totally charming: distinctive architecture, buildings that date from the Gold Rush of 1898 and wooden sidewalks alongside wide dirt streets—and enough bar seats for every full-time resident (or so the legend goes).

But I suppose we always want to change the people and places we adore, at least a little bit. As a naive urbanite, what surprised me during my three months in this Northern town of about 1,300 is that the problems I wish I could solve are ones I thought were blights only in big cities.

Despite a severe and long-standing housing crisis, for example, NIMBYism and an irrational fear of increased density recently helped scuttle a proposal to build six small, but affordable homes.

Unused—or underused—heritage buildings are another challenge. Several are owned by a private landowner who seems content to watch his real estate portfolio rot; alas, the town can’t do much about that. Others, though, are the property of the federal government, which can be just as frustrating.

Parks Canada owns 26 sites in the Klondike and has faithfully restored most of them to serve as popular tourists attractions, offices or housing. But a few deserve “can do better” on their report cards. Harrington’s Storefor instance, displays a historical exhibit called “Dawson As They Saw It.” Pleasant enough, I guess, but hardly the most productive activity given the prime centre-of-town location.

I visited a few other landmarks during Doors Open Dawson in May. The 1901 post office, a turn-of-the-century jewel, is partially open to the public during summer tours but the Dawson Daily News building, which Parks has done some work on, remains closed, the printing press and other equipment shielded by sheets and tarps. Even more disheartening was the sight of Lowe’s Mortuary and Billy Bigg’s Blacksmith Shop (photo above); without the funds to do more, Parks Canada has been reduced to merely trying to keep these structures erect.

One major problem facing Dawson City is that its population is so much smaller than it was at its peak during the gold rush; at home at forty thousand people at one point, Dawson City is now permanent home to just over thirteen hundred people according to the last census. Keeping even the core of such a vastly reduced urban area intact must be a huge, possibly unconquerable, task.

The climate, too, must be problematic from the perspective of preserving the city intact, since--as a commenter notes--melting permafrost can do serious damage indeed to building foundations.

I can't speak about the first edition, but the second edition of Kenneth Coates and William Morrison's Land of the Midnight Sun illustrates the history of Canada's Yukon Territory clearly and in detail. Before reading this book, I hadn't considered the extent to which the modern Yukon--and, for that matter, the whole of the Canadian North--has been overdetermined by the policies and priorities of the Canadian state, nearly always without reference to the people who lived there. The First Nations were, as usual, transformed from autonomous peoples who engaged with the fur trade on their own terms into paternalized dependents forced to rely on the guidance of the Canadian state; the gold rush lasted only so long and then the territory was left to languish by its colonial overlord in Ottawa, deprived of the investment that it needed to cop the territory was cut off from its connections to its natural metropole of Alaska via the Yukon River and associated with British Columbia; the Alaska Highway did revive the territory's economy, but it did so at the expense of the older and more established centres in the centre and north of the territory like Dawson City and Mayo, encouraging the concentration of the territory's population in the capital of Whitehorse. Coates and Morrison conclude their revised edition of their history of Yukon by hoping that after a century of tumultuous change and increasing marginalization in a Canada that no longer cares about its frontiers, Yukoners will be able to come to terms with themselves and their northern heritage, but even this hopeful conclusion is undermined by the evidence that they themselves have cited about the transitory nature of much of the territory's population and the patterning of Whitehorse on the model of the average (southern) Canadian city. Land of the Midnight Sun might perhaps best be thought of as at once a touching elegy to the Yukon of old and a meticulous reconstruction of how that Yukon evaporated.