David Cohen, the United States’ ambassador to Canada was on a brief and packed meeting junket with Yukon dignitaries in Whitehorse on May 30.
The ambassador sat down with Premier Ranj Pillai, Commissioner Adeline Webber, Yukon University president Lesley Brown and a trio of territorial government ministers. He also participated in a Yukon First Nations Chamber of Commerce business roundtable and paid a visit to the Yukon First Nations Wildland Fire Training Centre.
Sitting down with the News on the tail end of his visit to the territory, Cohen discussed Canada and the United States’ shared responsibility for continental defence and the important role that the Arctic plays in this. He noted that investments in this are being made with the modernization of Norad, the shared Canada/U.S. aerospace command, which is receiving tens of billions of dollars in additional funding over the next 20 years.
Beyond a military presence, he said economic development is also important for the security of the North. He thinks the U.S. embassy can help with this.
“One of the things I had an opportunity to talk about is, that our foreign commercial service group within the embassy, which is our department of commerce arm, actually led a very successful trade mission a couple of months ago to Yellowknife and Iqaluit and we are now scheduling a trade mission to Yukon for September,” Cohen said.
He said the mission’s goal will be to bring U.S. businesses to the territory to meet with Yukon businesses, including Indigenous businesses, to hopefully form partnerships. He added that the September mission was a topic of discussion at the Yukon First Nation Chamber of Commerce roundtable he attended.
While the embassy is still in the process of recruiting businesses that might be interested in coming to the Yukon in September, Cohen said that the climate and energy sectors are probably the hot spots when it comes to American business interest in the Yukon and the North more broadly. He described an interesting meeting with tidal energy business while on the trade trip to N.W.T.
Along with shared sovereignty and economic interests, the Yukon and Alaska share migratory wildlife. Cohen said discussions between Canada and the United States on wildlife, especially discussions involving the Yukon, are often productive.
Cohen’s visit to the Yukon comes on the heels of an agreement between Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to suspend all fishing — commercial, recreational and otherwise — that targets the struggling Yukon River chinook salmon for the next seven years.
The ambassador also spoke favourably about last year’s move by President Joe Biden’s administration to cancel all oil and gas drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a key Northern Alaska location for the Porcupine caribou herd that ranges into the Northern Yukon on its annual migration.
“They’re not drilling there, and so that we’re protecting the freedom and the ability of the caribou to migrate between Alaska and Canada, and preserving that.”
A bill that would reinstate the drilling leases passed in the United States house of representatives earlier this month. Washington, D.C.-focused news publication The Hill reports that it is unlikely to pass the Senate or be signed off on by the president.
Cohen said there are conversations going on in service of identifying new ways to collaborate on wildlife conservation.
Critical mineral resources and the infrastructure necessary to extract and use them featured heavily in Cohen’s conversation with Pillai, the ambassador said.
“I’m not saying this just because I’m talking to a Yukoner audience, but Yukon is incredibly impressive territory, I think very forward leaning, I think very conscious of the weaknesses that it has, for example, in the infrastructure space, and very creative and really looking for ways to be able to address those weaknesses,” Cohen said.
He said the discussion with Pillai dealt with power infrastructure in particular.
“There are a number of barriers to the full development and exploitation of critical minerals in Yukon. One of those major barriers is power, and how you how you develop the power and deploy the power to be able to support the extraction, the transportation, the processing and the manufacture of critical minerals coming out of the ground,” Cohen said.
He also repeated last month’s news on maintenance of the Shakwak portion of the Alaska Highway which has suffered from permafrost heaves. About $42.6 million from the Alaska Government will go towards fixing the 222-kilometre section of the highway from Destruction Bay to the Canada/U.S. border.
The ambassador praised the Yukon’s approach overall making particular mention of its relationship with First Nations.
Contact Jim Elliot at jim.elliot@yukon-news.com
