Yukoner’s deserve to know what their municipal governments are doing, and right now, they can't find out

Yukon has a Municipal Act. What it doesn't have is a way for residents to hold their municipal governments accountable using that Act, and that gap needs to close well before 2028.

Right now, Yukon is the only jurisdiction in Canada where residents have no legal right to municipal records. Our territorial Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (ATIPP), passed in 2018, does not include municipalities in its definition of a public body. That means if you want to see the emails, memos, or internal records behind a council decision affecting your community, you have no legal mechanism to ask for them. Every other province and territory in the country has closed this gap. Yukon has not.

That single gap creates a cascade of problems:

No financial transparency requirement. Residents have no guaranteed way to see how their municipal tax dollars are actually being spent, beyond whatever a council chooses to publish voluntarily.

No standardization of meeting minutes. There's no consistent requirement for what a municipality has to record, or how, when council makes a decision that affects the public.

Unclear tracking of conflicts of interest. It isn't clear to residents how conflicts of interest are identified, disclosed, or recorded at the municipal level, or how a member of the public would even go about finding that information if it exists at all.

No real recourse for taxpayers. If something looks wrong, a budget decision, a contract, a conflict that wasn't disclosed....there is currently no clear, accessible path for a resident to question it or compel an answer.

Here's the thing: most of this wouldn't even be necessary if municipal financial and decision-making records were transparent by default. ATIPP requests exist to fill gaps when information isn't already public. If our municipalities were required to proactively publish budgets, expenditures, minutes, and conflict-of-interest disclosures, residents wouldn't need to file a formal request just to find out how their community is being run.

Why this can't wait until 2028

The Yukon government's next legislated review relevant to this issue is set to begin in April 2027. That's a start,  but a review beginning in 2027 could easily mean no actual change reaches Yukoners until 2028 or later, if the review runs its normal course before any legislation is drafted, debated, and passed.

We're asking the Yukon government to move this timeline up: begin the review process now, in 2026, so that concrete legislative action, not just a review,  can happen within 2027. Other jurisdictions have already shown this doesn't need to be complicated. The Northwest Territories amended its access-to-information law to bring municipalities like Yellowknife and Inuvik under it, and experts have pointed to a straightforward path Yukon could follow: bring larger municipalities under access-to-information law immediately, and give smaller communities with real capacity constraints a defined, written-into-law runway to catch up. That's a reasonable, achievable model,  not a reason to wait another year to even start.

What we're doing about it: We're organizing a petition to the Yukon Legislative Assembly calling for:

*Immediate inclusion of municipalities under Yukon's Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, with a phased approach for smaller communities if needed

*Mandatory, standardized public financial reporting for all Yukon municipalities

*Standardized requirements for municipal meeting minutes and public accessibility of those records

*Clear rules for identifying, disclosing, and publicly recording conflicts of interest at the municipal level

*A defined process for residents to raise concerns and receive an actual response

We believe Yukoners have waited long enough to see how decisions are made in their own communities. If you agree, please sign the petition