Yukon Confidential

2008-04-19T06:08:00.000-07:00

Sorry, readers, that this blog has lain dormant for so long. I've been away (long long way away), but will be getting home to the Yukon next month, and intend to get busy again on getting some articles together.

In the meantime, I was checking the hits on the site in my absence, and came upon a search expression used by one visitor to find Yukon Confidential. It read "Why is life such bullshit?" That was so sad I had to have a look, and found that there were 75,000 hits when you type that in to the ole Google bar.

Anyway, I found a good bit of writing in my little search, and here is the link:

http://home.earthlink.net/~aliasbruce/id40.html

It's pretty focused on the USA's current struggle over meaning, but there's plenty there for us lot to chew on, too. Once we've got a good fix on bull, the tricky stuff will start: how to get it down to acceptable levels, how to get public figures to adopt the habit of telling the truth, and how we have to learn to live with less bull ourselves. After all, there's no sense in getting our leaders to tell the truth, if we are still going to lynch them when they do.

Bullshit for Beginners, Part 2.

2007-12-23T20:54:00.000-08:00

OK, I said I would offer some insights on bullshit, so I’d better start coming up with the goods. Here goes.

First of all, I’d like to apologize to the gentler folk among our readership for the frequent repetition of this vulgar word – the fact is that no word in the more formal English vocabulary does such a fine job. Wikipedia says it appeared in popular speech in the US during WWII, while the OED suggests its root is in the Old French word boul, meaning fraud or deceit. All this roughly aligns with my own recollection that bull was an old soldier word for all the pointless tasks the rank and file used to have to do for no reason at all, except to keep them busy, such as paint rows of rocks white, shine their toe caps until you could see passing clouds reflected in them, fold their blankets in very difficult ways, and all that… bull.

Because it’s vulgar, we polite Canadians sometimes bowdlerize bullshit as BS but as far as I’m concerned that is worse than being direct: it retains all the vulgarity of bullshit without providing the satisfaction of swearing and, let’s face it, when bullshit strikes one does have to swear, because it REALLY PISSES ONE OFF. So I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll go back to the source and use the word bull when I can, except when I have to blow off some steam.

What types of iniquity tend to provoke the “That’s Bullshit” response among those who are not so habituated that only the shrugged shoulder response remains?

1. Lies: You the reader can fill in some blanks here. The inside of my skull is so thickly wallpapered with examples since my first conscious thought, I don’t know where to start.

2. Obvious Injustice: see above.

3. Spin: the willful invention, distortion or misrepresentation of purportedly factual evidence in support of an argument known to be false. This includes simple exaggeration but is differentiated from it by the intention to deceive for gain. Spin is often closely allied to type 4 bull: claiming or imputing false motivation. The realm of the PR slough shark.

4. Claiming or imputing false motivation: e.g. pharmaceutical companies claim that their motive is primarily the relief of suffering, while the vast majority of their R&D funding goes toward the development of high-cost palliative drugs for treatment of chronic conditions most prevalent in wealthy countries, with little or no investment into cures for life-threatening conditions common in poor countries, for the simple reason that the former will generate greater profits for longer than the latter. The Japanese government claiming that they are going to kill over 1,000 whales this year for science is another shining example of this category of bull.

An example of imputing false motives would be that asserting that the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has invented or hyped climate change to justify its own existence and keep their cushy jobs and their seats at numerous junkets around the world – I know that is bull not because I think that the IPCC is made up entirely of selfless saints but because I know that a) they are so highly qualified that they would be able to get well-paid and stimulating jobs wherever they wanted, that b) travelling to strings of international conferences is a truly unpleasant way to spend one’s time, and that c) the people making this assertion are either paid to make it or are bottom feeders dependent on fat cats higher up the food chain… who are paid to make it.

5. Obfuscation: making the truth of a matter as complex and mystifying as possible, so that only the person who has come prepared to make the desired point can comment (and, of course, that person is you)… a.k.a. blinding with science.

6. Bombast: the use of pompous and extravagant rhetoric to intimidate and exclude the less articulate, and generally look important.

7. Hot air: similar to the above, but with a hint of menace. Denis the Fentie’s specialty.

8. Absurd bureaucracy or redundant procedural rigmarole. Again, I’ll leave it to the gentle reader to amuse him/herself on these dark nights by listing some examples from their own experience. Perhaps an after-dinner parlor game for the Christmas season…

This is not a comprehensive list and, in truth, once you begin to think a bit more closely about the anatomy of bull, new categories begin to leap out at you. You were always aware that there was a good deal of bull built into public discourse, but you lived with it, but only when you apply a magnifying glass do you realize that it is not just a sprinkling but a seething mass of maggot-ridden crap.

Having established this preliminary classification, I went through the Hansard record of the last day of this past sitting of the Yukon legislature and assessed each passage for bull content. I expected it to be around 10-25% bull. Bearing in mind that any given piece of schpiel can be (and often is) more than one type of bull at the same time (e.g. lies, spin and bombast), the total bull score for the day’s proceedings turned out to be over 300% bull, with only 20% having any use whatsoever, in terms of governance. This is like being told that 60% of your own body’s cells are parasites (they are, by the way, but that is natural, if creepy).

Like the parasitic colonies that live on and in our own bodies, much of this bull is not really harmful. Some of it may even play a useful part in the ecology of truth, (phew – that’s a term I’ve just made up all on my own. Check it out for obfuscation and bombast). I have come up with three proposed factors that differentiate harmless bull from the more sinister bull that is crippling our individual and collective minds. I call them twist, superstructure and constituency. I will be explaining these terms in YC’s next posting.

For now though, I’ve got a bottle of Single Malt, bought as a special festive treat, and I think I hear it calling to me. Happy Christmas, everyone.

Is There Life After Bullshit?

2007-12-06T16:08:00.000-08:00

In my many idle moments, one of the questions I occasionally ponder upon is bullshit or, more specifically, can we as individuals and as a society really be functioning normally living, as we do, in the face of such an unrelenting blizzard of bullshit.

In fact, I’ve been thinking about bullshit for about 40 years now, so I was a little ashamed to realize the other day that I had not even begun to get a handle on this important shaper of our lives. I barely even know what is or is not bullshit, or what distinguishes it from simple lying, let alone how it operates, how important it is, and at what levels of concentration does it actually drive you insane.

So I thought I’d start ordering my thoughts by looking to see what work other, cleverer, people had done on the subject. The answer is Amazingly Little: it basically adds up to two books - On Bullshit, by Harry J. Frankfurt, philosophy professor at Princeton, available from Princeton University on-line bookstore, and Your Call is Important to Us: the truth about bullshit, by Laura Penny (a rollicking good rant about corporate corruption in Washington, but hardly a ‘theory of bullshit’). There’s also a website The Bullshit Observer (http://toddanthonydirect.typepad.com/) which is worth a visit. So, my shame was greatly diminished when it dawned on me that Yukon Confidential was in fact well-placed to make a meaningful contribution to the discipline of bullshit studies. Yukon Confidential is now on the cutting edge of bullshit. Just by saying it is.

I offer up to our extensive and devoted readership, therefore, an article which proposes a categorization of bullshit which goes beyond a single definition of this subtle and multi-layered phenomenon, as a first step to articulating what, if anything, we Yukoners should do in the face of torrential bullshit streams in all walks of life, in order to avoid finally losing altogether our tenuous grip on reality.

But before pulling on my yellow rubber gloves and getting stuck in, I’d better address the unuttered question, “why bloody well bother?” I intend first to establish an operational categorization and shared language of bullshit, before moving on to examine Yukon politics with these tools. We know that bullshit is widely distributed, at varying concentrations, throughout the public and private domains:

Ø in the thousands of advertising messages we receive every day, from the sexually exciting shampoo to the fuel efficient SUV,

Ø in news reporting which, in the name of balance and objectivity, will undermine an overwhelmingly convincing case by giving equal air time to a sleezeball lobbyist paid to say the opposite,

Ø staff meetings, consultations or any setting where participants are not there to say what they think so much as to represent a position,

Ø wherever people gather together to drink (though both may be true, which, in your view is most frequently true: in vino veritas or in vino horseshit?)

Ø The CBC Radio 1 weather forecast (surely only the forces of bullshit could convert snow into “flurry activity”),

but why has bullshit, like mercury in tuna, become so highly concentrated in the tissue of the body politic? Finally, Yukon Confidential’s lofty aim is to envision what Yukon politics would like without the bullshit. This is as challenging (and possibly as daft) an endeavor as landing a chicken on the moon equipped only with household utensils found in the typical kitchen, but I count on you all to cheer me on.

You can now post comments

2007-12-06T11:13:00.001-08:00

Due to an upsurge of popular demand, the Comments function has now been enabled. Comments will be moderated, so will not appear immediately, but should normally hit the blog in a day or two. Or, as in the past, you can also write to Yukon Confidential at the email address given on the page.

Yukon’s Energy Future: Will we be damning our rivers to sell electricity to B.C. once climate change dries their rivers up?

2007-11-28T21:03:00.000-08:00

Since the Faro mine closed down, Yukon has been in the privileged position of having surplus electricity generating capacity. We have a pretty hefty diesel generating capacity (39 Megawatts out of a total of 116), but under normal conditions, the great majority of our electricity comes from hydro – the “green” energy – so we can run our hot tubs, computers, and all those other gizmos that we buy as good little consumers, without the guilty thought that we are churning out green house gases in the process.

Sure, there are other environmental costs to hydroelectricity, but in our case, as long as we are careful about what we do to the water levels on Aishihik and Marsh Lakes and Mayo Dam, and we manage not to wipe out too many fish or their spawning areas, we can light up our houses like Christmas trees from October to March with a pretty clear conscience. It would be a different matter, though, if we started coming close to consuming all the electricity we can currently generate. Then we would have to start looking around for brand new generating capacity and – given that for Yukon Energy (YEC) electricity seems pretty exclusively to mean hydro – that would probably mean messing up another lake or (kiss the salmon goodbye) even damming a river. Then we would have to choose between capping our energy use (has any jurisdiction actually done that yet?) or greatly increasing the environmental cost of our electricity – in one big jump. Judging from what other jurisdictions have done so far, we would probably be just like all the others and drown half of the territory rather than curb energy use, but maybe I’m just being uncharitable. I’m sure there’d be years of hand-wringing and angst before we got the concrete pouring. By the way, if anyone needs a quick backgrounder on why damming rivers for power is such a rotten idea, go to the International Rivers Network and click on their “about rivers and dams” link and then the impacts link (http://www.irn.org/basics/ard/index.php?id=dams.html), and you’ll soon get the idea.

Now, though we’re not there yet, a couple of factors are pushing us closer to that point. Firstly, increased mining activity: We are going to build a transmission line from Carmacks to Stewart and use it to sell power to Minto mine (currently using their own diesel generators). The Carmacks Copper project also might fire up and turn out to be another big electricity consumer. Secondly, we’re using more and more electricity domestically. So, despite the fact that Faro mine closed down and left us with all that extra capacity, we’re now getting closer to using it all up.

Some of the more paranoid conspiracy theorists have been whispering furtively of late that Yukon Energy has Big Plans to increase capacity, so I went and looked up their web site and found their 20-year resource plan (http://www.yukonenergy.ca/environment/reports/resource/ ).

It all looks very sensible, and I failed to get that Halloween creeping flesh sensation I was looking for. There, laid out, are the four capital projects YEC is hoping will keep our energy balance in the black for a long while yet: i) overhauling or replacing the diesel generators at the Whitehorse facility, ii) putting in a third turbine at Aishihik Lake, iii) increasing the amount of water it can draw off Marsh Lake for power generation, and iv) building that Carmacks-Stewart line – that will not just provide YEC power to Minto mine, but will also link the South Yukon and North Yukon grids. The third one (Marsh Lake draw down increase) has been dropped in the face of opposition from locals. So, when it comes to new hydroelectric capacity, we’re just looking at the third turbine at Aishihik Lake. Yes there is a bit of an environmental issue there, as YEC initially wanted to keep lake water levels as low as they can get away with, so that in a good, high precipitation year, YEC would be able to generate more power rather than having to spill any excess water without getting any juice out of it. DFO’s authorization, spurred on by Champaigne and Aishihik First Nation’s traditional knowledge and their own biologists meanwhile, legally insists that they operate at the upper end of their permitted draw down regime, so they don’t (hem hem) wipe out the white fish. But that aside, it all looks pretty benign.

Tucked away in Part Three of the 20 year plan – Appendix B – are the hydroelectric project options that have been considered, ranging from very small to very large. Given that the talk until now had been meeting domestic demand plus a couple of big but not huge mines, and that no-one as far as I know has been talking about selling Yukon power down South, I wasn’t too interested in the section on the 60 Megawatt + projects… until, that is, I saw the words “…have the potential to service most or all of the potential Alaska Highway Pipeline loads.”. Now that gave me the creeps. Just how much electricity is this pipelines going to need? I thought it was just a couple of pumping stations.

Or are we talking about selling electricity to our southern neighbours? Currently climate change geeks are predicting that B.C.’s hydro generating capacity is going to take a huge hit over the next decade or two, as snow packs deplete and summer rains dry up.

The three ‘Very Large’ projects considered, by the way, are i) damming the Pelly at Granite Canyon, ii) damming the Stewart at Fraser Falls, and iii) damming the Yukon downstream of Whitehorse (maybe at Five Finger Rapids, who knows, but if a tour operator can build a suspension bridge to nowhere on the Skagway road and charge people over $18 to see it, anything is possible).

OK everyone, stay calm, and say slowly after me, “ It Ain’t Gonna Happen”. Good. That feels better, doesn’t it? That’s just what YEC say, too. They probably mean it. I’m just winding you up. Honest.

Now, for those of you who have stuck with this article this far, I will begin to get to the point. If YEC has no intention of doing any large or very large hydro projects on hitherto un-messed-up rivers, how come during the Umbrella Final Agreement negotiations YTG insisted on retaining land notations on 10 of the big hydro project sites they studied back in the 80’s?

Enter Intergroup Consultants.

This company was hired by Yukon Energy to help them write the 20-year resource plan. They have been involved in very big hydro projects for 30-odd years, especially in Manitoba (Intergroup is based in Winnipeg). They were closely involved with the Northern Flood Agreement between Manitoba Hydro and the Cree peoples of Northern Manitoba, which led to the flooding of large expanses of land, massive environmental degradation, displacement of people, the destruction of the native-run commercial fisheries, soaring suicide rates… and they are retained as lobbyists for the Manitoba Industrial Power Users Group in submissions to the Manitoba Utilities Board.

The Northern Flood Agreement was (and continues to be) a very ugly affair in which Intergroup played (and continues to play) a central role. What are they doing advising on our energy policy for the next 20 years? Any guesses? Judging by Intergroup’s track record, and the fact that they are economists working mostly for big industry, it’s more likely to be about Big Money than about Yukoners’ interests.

Xcel Energy, of Minnesota, is the biggest customer for electricity from the Northern Manitoba hydro project. Manitoba Hydro markets it as “green energy”. One lady from Minnesota who buys her electricity from Xcel started wondering how green her electricity really was (you should see the Xcel billboards, they really make you go all misty-eyed) and took a trip to South Indian Lake, Manitoba to find out. She was so horrified that she ended up making a film about it, called “Green Green Water” (check it out at http://www.greengreenwater.com/index.php).

Whilst you’re on the web, have a look at another couple of things that might intrigue you about Intergroup. Firstly, if you go to the Yukon Energy website and then click on their contract registry, and then click on consulting contracts, you will see all the consulting contracts signed, by year. Intergroup Consultants are there, at the top of the list. And what was the contract about? “Support services regarding hydro reconnaissance activities”. Now say after me “It’ll … Never … Happen”.

What else have they done for YEC recently? Well, they’ve done a lot of work on… oh yes… the Carmacks-Stewart Transmission line and, back in ’05, something called “Resource Planning”. A little vague, if you ask me – it probably refers to that little job they had writing that 20-year plan. Another thing to note; no contract prices (let alone any other details) are entered in the registry, even though YEC say they will make public the details of every contract over $5,000. And these are ‘sole source’ contracts, with no tender process to worry about.

Now folks, I’m not wanting to get you all agitated, so do please practice your breathing exercises, and don’t worry. I’m sure It… Will… Never… Happen , but just in case, well, you heard it here first.

Eating Crow Already

2007-11-19T20:03:00.000-08:00

Well, I said that if the Ombudsman's office did not call back to cancel the meeting I eventually wrangled, I would apologise... Sorry.

I did indeed meet with someone at the Ombudsman's office. It was a pretty anodyne affair, but largely because the act under which the Ombudsman operates is so focused on responding to individuals' grievances there is little scope to consider broader issues of public interest.

So we spoke largely about whether whistleblower legislation would be useful or could possibly work. More of that later, but for now, let it be known, the Ombudsman's Office did speak to me in the end.

Fear and Loathing in the Civil Service

2007-11-09T21:35:00.000-08:00

The Wednesday (November 7th) edition of the Yukon News contained a letter to the editor that sums up the reign of terror that the civil service seems to be living under. From the point of view of the launch of this website, it couldn’t have been better timed. For those of you who missed it, I’m posting sections of it here. The author requested that his name be withheld, and included in his submission a fairly lengthy justification as to why he should wish to remain anonymous. I’d like to congratulate the usually rather docile Yukon News for publishing this, along with the body of the letter itself: I think it makes good reading.
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Editor’s note: Last week, we received this letter on the workers’ advocate firing from a civil servant. The writer despises anonymous letters, and yet he felt strongly he must ask for anonymity.

The reasons for his request said much about the Yukon civil service, both its operation and its state of mind under the current government. And so we’ve printed both.

Fear and loathing in the Yukon civil service

I think anonymous correspondence is the realm of cowards — I have great disdain for it — so let me explain my yellow streak in this situation.

I bounced this off my wife — she said, “Are you walking the plank?”

I bounced this off one guy at work — he said, “These people are criminals and thugs with long memories.”

I bounced it off another guy at work who said, “You are sticking your head up — you risk having someone virtually stand over your shoulder for the rest of your YTG career watching for any slip up — everyone around you can be surfing Facebook all day — but as soon as you go there — BLAM! You are busted!”

I live in a city I want to stay in and all of my non-YTG job options probably pay half the ludicrous salary that I get for the amount of work I actually do. I have at least 10 years to go before I retire and I have a mortgage.

I work in an area where people are carefully selected for promotion and have bullshit jobs crafted for them and then the hiring process carefully managed to ensure they end up in those jobs (PSC may not think it works that way, but if PSC ever came out of their offices they might be very surprised).

The process could be easily reversed.

The primary criteria for promotions seem to be the number of DUIs you have (the more the better). Since I’m not a drinker, my job is already precarious enough. If I keep my head down and shut up they forget I’m there — I get paid every two weeks and everything is cool. But if I get lippy, I can see being out the door in under a year. Two if I have no pride.

I think, realistically, there SHOULD be, and probably is, little risk in me attaching my name to this. But I think there is a little risk and it affects others as well as myself. Sorry. I know where you are coming from. I’d love to put my name behind this — I actually think I did a not-shabby job of writing it (you should have seen draft 1 — that would have got me fired tomorrow!). I just think there is a risk, and I’m too cautious to take that risk at this point in my career/life.
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“Criminals and thugs with long memories”? Our elected officials and senior civil servants?. Truly, we are living in dark times.

Later on in his letter, the author cited the Ombudsman’s office as a possible model for that of the Workers’ Advocate, as a genuinely independent body. Coincidentally, as part of the preparation for setting up this website, I asked for an appointment with the Ombudsman or one of her deputies. When asked what it was about, I explained, “I’m setting up a website dealing with issues relating to accountability in government, particularly with regard to natural resources, and I would like to talk to someone in the Ombudsman’s office about how they see their role, what they see are the major threats and constraints to open government in the Yukon – particularly as it is a small jurisdiction – and also I would like to know whatever happened to the whistle-blower legislation that has been promised by successive governments. Are there circumstances where the public interest trumps confidentiality clauses signed by civil servants?” Very basic, general questions, surely.

This triggered a response of stuttering panic on the part of the Ombudsman’s office. Eventually, a meeting was scheduled, though it was left open as to who was actually going to speak to me. They would call me during the week, they said, to confirm who I would be seeing. That didn’t happen, so on the eve of the meeting, I phoned again and asked. This again was met with nervous vacilation, and I was told they would call back in a few minutes. Soon, sure enough, the phone rang and it was one of the Ombudsman’s deputies. “We’re not sure we would be able to comment on these issues”… “The Ombudsman might be able to say something regarding the Act for which she is directly responsible, but other than that…”, “Have you read last year’s Ombudsman’s report to the legislature?”. The poor woman clearly did not want to talk to me. She said that she was heading to Regina in a couple of days for a meeting, and that she was rather “taken up”, but I had a distinct feeling that being too busy was not the reason. I decided to persist, and she agreed to reschedule the interview for the week after her return from Regina… “In the meantime, I’ll talk again [again?] to the Ombudsman and see where she stands, and if she will be able to comment”.

I fully expect that I will get another phone call next week, to cancel. If not I will gladly eat humble pie and apologize for being so beastly about these obviously nice and concerned people. But what on earth is making them so jittery, and what does all this say about “an independent agency, at arm’s length of government”, whose declared mission is to promote accountability and openness in government? Are these timid folk the firebrands fighting for genuine democracy and open government on our behalf, or have the ‘thugs with long memories’ got to them, too?

So, if there is anyone out there, who works in the Yukon civil service, or any other level of government in the Yukon, who has first hand knowledge of blatant wrong-doing, the anti-democratic pursuit of hidden agendas, abuse of power, corruption, or similar, contact us at Yukon Confidential and give us chapter and verse (and evidence, if possible). No childish whining, please, just facts. We don’t work for the government and are not worried about losing our jobs, so we can get that information out into the public domain. We need you to feed us the info. We won’t divulge our sources. Just make sure you back up your emails and other files of interest stored on YTG servers to a removable storage device before you come to us.

“The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.”
Judge John Curran, Dublin, July 10th, 1790, in reference to the mayoral elections.

I’m writing this on Friday 9th, just after reading today's Yukon News. I’m rather disappointed there wasn’t a flurry of correspondence in response to the anonymous letter in the previous edition. I hoped for a mix of righteous bluster from the great and the good, along the lines of “How dare this person… disrespect for our democratic institutions… officials’ powers constantly constrained by democratic checks and balances”, and so on, and on the other hand a torrent of examples of abuse of power, woeful mismanagement, bullying and hidden corporate collusion in government. But nothing. The investing of $36Million’s worth of public money in an obviously dodgy enterprise, in contravention of the YTG finance rules, seems to have taken up all the space for now – well, that is a pretty juicy story, so I can't complain.

We haven’t heard the last of any of this, but it is up to you to speak up.

2007-10-03T09:02:00.000-07:00

This site is under construction. We should be able to start posting articles around the middle of November. Watch this space, Yukoners.

About YukonConfidential

2007-10-02T17:10:00.000-07:00

1. What's the idea?

Yukon Confidential is a web log which aims to disseminate information regarding governance in the Yukon and to promote public debate on the kind of future we want.

We feel that the Yukon is at a crossroads. Our remoteness from world markets and the impact of our climate on the cost of doing business here have, for decades, protected us from the sorts of pressures that have led to the clear-cut logging of B.C. or the rip-and-tear oil and gas development of Alberta, to give just a couple of examples.

Now, though, all that is changing. Rapid economic growth in Asia is driving up the world prices of oil, timber and metals. New technologies are increasingly overcoming the traditional difficulties of taking resources out of the North, and Big Money is starting to look at the Yukon as ripe for the taking.

A succession of Yukon Governments have made it very difficult for outside business interests to know where to start to get a foothold in the territory - or have simply scared them off. Years of uncertainty over land claims, the placer authorisation process, the Yukon Environmental and Socioeconomic Assessment process and so on, have made for such a bewildering regulatory maze that no-one wants to set up a business here - especially not a resource extraction business.

Now, though, we have a territorial Government which is very keen to get the ball rolling, and to make things easy for industry. The problem is, they are cutting corners. Rather than push through a process of deregulation which would be fought at every turn in the legislature, they are making side deals, taking control of what are supposed to be "arms length" regulatory bodies, instructing regulators to back off on enforcement of environmental controls, tightening gag orders on public employees, and playing fast and loose with lisencing processes which are supposed to protect the environment and ensure public disclosure of business activities.

Over the past couple of years I have listened time and again to campfire discussions involving people all sorts of background and political persuasion, lamenting their sense of powerlessness in the face of double dealing and bullying in the public service, as the Territorial Government pushes through the resource extraction agenda, and drives a coach and horses through the democratic process while they are at it. Ours is a small community, and stepping on bosses' toes has consequences: you're not a part of the club anymore, you're not told what's going on... eventually you lose your job, or give up and move on, take early retirement, extended stress leave, and so on.

This blog aims to get information of what is really going on in government out into the public domain, where it belongs. We really want Yukoners to have some control of the future of our territory. Others know exactly what they want the Yukon to look like in ten or twenty years' time and are well on their quiet way to making it happen. We think we should have a say.

Most Yukoners I know love this territory with a passion - even if they sometimes can't put their finger on exactly why. The most common expression I have heard, when I push people to explain why it is so special to them, is "It's the last good place". I'll be damned if I'll give it up without a fight.

I see in the Yukon News (Monday October 1st, page 10) that the first week of October is "Right to Know Week" - whatever that is supposed to mean - so now seems an auspicious time to get going with this blog.

2. Who are we?

We have a small editorial group of a few people from different walks of life, and we spread the workload of writing and editing between us. We use our personal networks to dig around and turn up nasty little stories which we hope will keep the nastier elements of our government on their toes, and promote wider public debate. We don't expect to make too many friends in the process, but what the heck - that's the cost of free speech. We need to be clear though that we are not out to bash this government in particular; the emphasis is rather on prompting debate on what we want Yukon to look like in the future. Will Yukoners take control of the forces that will change the face of the territory?

3. What is Yukon Confidential about?

Energy, Mines, Resources, Highways, Agriculture, Forestry, and what YTG is up to regarding the resource sector. We reckon it is how these issues are handled that is really going to shape the Yukon of 2020 and beyond, and determine if anyone still calls it "the last good place" in the same way they do now. As we develop the site, we'll try to cover more stuff from the communities and first nations.

4. And the style? Is it just a muck-throwing machine?

Well, that would be fun, at least for a little while, but that's not what we have in mind. We don't have the people or resources to make for fully researched and well-written investigative journalism - but we will do our best. While trying to provide an entertaining read in straight-forward language, we'll also try and ensure that everything we write is substantiated, and that our opinions are based on evidence and reasonable supposition.

5. When will Yukon Confidential stop talking about itself and start publishing articles?

Watch this space... We hope to be firing the first salvos over the next few weeks. Right now we're just trying to get the site to work properly, and researching the first articles. We'll aim to have a fresh posting every couple of weeks. Once we're up and running, you'll be able to get new postings on Yukon Confidential sent automatically to your email account, by subscribing to our feed - it's free.

6. What opportunity will the public have to contribute?

We want to retain editorial control and keep the focus on governance, so (at this stage at any rate) we have not set this site up so everyone can post comments straight to it. Your input is important to us, though. Please send any comments or information you may have to offer to the email address that appears on this page.