Yellowknife's mayor says that city did not ask territory to trigger evacuation

Yellowknife's mayor said, as far as she knows, concerns about staffing at Yellowknife's evacuation centre were not related to the territorial decision to evacuate the community of 22,000 last month. 

This comes after Minister Shane Thompson told CBC Trailbreaker host Hilary Bird, earlier this week, that the territory started planning the evacuation of Yellowknife after the city came forward to say that they could not run the shelter-in-place plan without staff from the territory. 

"They asked us what we were going to do, how we could work together collaboratively, to get the residents out of there," he said. 

Mayor Rebecca Alty told CBC that the city never asked the GNWT to evacuate Yellowknife, only to help with a possible evacuation plan. She says that the communication plan Thompson is referring to was probably a written communication that her administration sent to the territorial government on Aug. 15.

"On Tuesday, we reached out to say, we need support for an evacuation reception centre here in Yellowknife… as well as looking at if there is a community-wide evacuation needed, we should begin planning on that," she explained. 

According to Alty, the city also requested more support for the city's emergency operations centre, and for municipal firefighters in the same communication. 

Alty confirmed that the city did hear from the territory's emergency management department before Tuesday that the Department of Health and Social Services might have difficulty staffing the evacuation centre. But she said that she wasn't concerned, because the EMO confirmed that it would find other staff who could work at the evacuation centre.

"The territorial government was working, and that's why the evacuation centre was set up here in Yellowknife. We didn't have concerns that they wouldn't be able to deliver," she said.

She also said that she is confident that, if fire conditions had been different, the city would have been able to carry out its shelter-in-place plan.

"We work with the territorial government on that, and if the territory hadn't been able to find the resources within the GNWT, then they go and ask at the federal level," she said.

"I didn't have concerns that the city, the territorial, or the national government wasn't going to be able to come through on this. It was going to happen."