Ed. note: this is one of a series of riding profiles for the Nov. 7 election being published in random order.

Encompassing downtown Whitehorse, the big box stores and the industrial zone, Whitehorse Centre may be the riding familiar to the greatest number of Yukoners.

It sits on the overlapping territories of the Kwanlin Dun First Nation and Ta’an Kwach’an Council, and is bordered by the clay cliffs to west and the Yukon River to the east.

But it’s also a changing riding. Slick new condo buildings are cropping up beside older, single-family homes and bringing in a new population of affluent residents.

Young families, on the other hand, are opting to plant roots in the residential subdivisions, with their trim front yards and garages.  

Whitehorse Centre has been a Yukon NDP stronghold since the ’90s, save two years in the early 2000s, when constituents elected Liberal Mike McLarnon, who, with MLAs Don Roberts and Wayne Jim, went on to leave Pat Duncan’s government to sit as an independent.

Indeed, the NDP’s leader, Liz Hanson, is the incumbent. Hanson won with a landslide 62 per cent of the vote in the 2011 election.

She drew well over twice as many votes as her next-closest competitor in the riding, then-MLA Marian C. Horne of the Yukon Party, and five times more than the Liberals’ Patrick Singh.

But Whitehorse Centre in 2016 is an entirely new beast.

This time, Hanson goes up against two well-known challengers: Doug Graham of the Yukon Party, who served as Education minister under Premier Darrell Pasloski, and Tamara Goeppel of the Yukon Liberal Party. The prominent businesswoman is a familiar face in Yukon boardrooms and at community events.

Doug Graham

Graham currently represents Porter Creek North, and initially said he wouldn’t seek re-election.

Then, to the surprise of many, he announced a bid to run in downtown Whitehorse.

The Yukon Party’s riding association in Whitehorse Centre asked him to run, Graham says, and he decided, why not?

“When I agreed to run downtown, I went in with my eyes wide open. I knew who I was up against,” he says, noting that both Hanson and Goeppel are local heavyweights.  

“I knew it would be a real chore, but this is part of what makes electioneering and politics fun, is challenge.”

Of course, riding association officials wouldn’t have approached Graham if they didn’t think he’d be a contender.

Graham initially became a cabinet minister in the late 1970s under the late Chris Pearson’s former territorial Conservative government.

Before re-entering territorial politics in 2011, Graham was a well-liked city councillor who served city hall for more than a decade.

He’s spent most of his life in the Yukon, and lived downtown when he was young.

Graham doesn’t live in Whitehorse Centre but he feels connected to the area from his time on council.

“Downtown, it’s a real eclectic mix of people,” he says. “You have everything from young people just starting out in the riding to seniors that have lived in Yukon, and some in Whitehorse, all their lives.”

The riding has its share of problems too, he acknowledges.

Crime and late-night parties at the base of the clay cliffs are a concern for residents, as is the future of the single-family homes in Old Town.

“So many people are worried that soon, the single-family dwellings will disappear from the Old Town side, and it’ll all be condos and multiple housing units,” he says.

“Many of the people that I’ve talked to ... would really like to see the feel for Old Town remain the way it is now.”

As minister of Education, Graham oversaw the introduction of a residential school component into the Grade 10 curriculum, and he’s especially proud of that. He wants to continue that work if re-elected.

“I really, really want to be involved in the curriculum changes that we’re doing at Education, I think that is so important,” he says.

He also wants to see the continuing care centre in Whistle Bend completed.

“So many seniors are living downtown right now that are going to need that facility in the next five to 10 years,” he says.

“When I was young, that never used to happen. When you get to a certain age, you move out,” he says. “It just isn’t happening anymore.”

Tamara Goeppel

Goeppel has lived on the same street in downtown Whitehorse her whole life. Her two grown sons now live on the street too.

“It’s a bit of a unique situation,” she admits.

Over her lifetime in the Yukon, Goeppel has worn many hats: she was a placer claim labourer and a carpenter’s apprentice in Germany.

She managed a travel agency and renovated and owns the Scotiabank building on Main Street.

Goeppel has sat on the Yukon Workers’ Compensation Health and Safety Board, the Yukon Hospital Corp. board of trustees, and on the board of the Yukon Quest.

The competitive spirit is strong in Goeppel. Between working and volunteering, she has made time to train and compete in ultra-long-distance runs, triathlons and multi-day cycling races.

For Goeppel, who’s not one to shy away from competition, politics are the natural next step.

In the fall of 2014, Goeppel made an unsuccessful bid for the federal Liberal nomination for the 2015 election, but lost to Larry Bagnell.

The defeat, however, did nothing to dampen her spirits. Rather, it seems to have fuelled her fire.

Goeppel has been aggressively campaigning since she announced her intention to run nearly a year ago. By her count, she’s had “close to 800 conversations in the riding with folks.

“We’ve basically knocked on every single door twice now,” she says.

On those doorsteps, Goeppel has heard about a need for affordable and supportive housing downtown.

The government can build affordable housing downtown that won’t impede on the quirky, historic character of Old Town, she says.

“You don’t always need to build a big structure; you can actually refurbish some smaller houses to do it.”

Indeed, affordable housing is needed across the Yukon, not just in Whitehorse, she says.

Goeppel has no qualms about facing off with an established party leader.

“I’ve only lived in this riding; I can’t even try and pretend to know streets of another riding ... so I would not represent my home because I’m afraid of my competitor?” she asks.

Kowtowing to the competition would be uncharacteristic of Goeppel.

“I thought, ‘well, in sport, you call it a coward,’” she says.

“I’d rather face this competition, and if I’m not successful, but I tried my best, I can live with that.

“Better than not having tried at all.”

Liz Hanson

When Hanson moved to the Yukon from Calgary in 1978, leading the Yukon NDP was not the endgame.

By her own admission, she’s not an extroverted person.

“I don’t like putting myself out there,” she says. “I have had a long history throughout my lifetime of being involved in social justice things, but not being the spokesperson.”

Hanson left a career as a social worker in the Yukon’s communities for a federal government job working on Yukon First Nations land claims in the early 2000s.

After the 11 self-governing agreements that exist today were signed, she moved up the federal ranks and served four years as the director general of what was then called Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. Then she retired.

That’s where the current chapter of Hanson’s life begins.

In retirement, Hanson couldn’t stop thinking about her previous work, and whether it risked being undone under the Yukon Party government.

“We were committed to a very different Yukon – a post-colonial world – that the relationship and between First Nations governments, the Yukon government and the federal government would be profoundly different going forward,” she says.

But the Yukon Party, she says, “just kept pushing back on what we negotiated.”

Rather than sit back and let someone else deal with it, Hanson decided to step out of retirement, and out of her comfort zone, to run for the NDP, eventually becoming leader.

After five years at the helm of the official Opposition, Hanson says she’s most proud of the NDP team she’s amassed.

At the start of her leadership, Hanson instructed her MLAs to learn the government departments better than the ministers and deputies that run them.

“And we’ve done that well,” she says.

“That’s reflected in the kinds of probing questions and suggestions we’ve made in the legislature about how we might do things differently, how we might do them better.”

After 18 years living in the Hillcrest neighbourhood, Hanson moved to Whitehorse Centre in 2011. Since then, she’s seen a dramatic shift in the demographics of the downtown core.

There is significant inequality in the riding, says Hanson.

“You have the very affluent in some of the new condo developments that have been put in over the last five years and you have the chronically homeless,” she says.

Residents who have lived in Old Town for a while are concerned about all the new buildings, and the impact they will have on the look and feel of the neighbourhood, says Hanson.

She’s heartened though, by the growth of the Downtown Residents Association, which saw 30 or 40 engaged citizens (by Hanson’s count) come out to the most recent annual general meeting.

“It’s a good sign that people realize they have to get involved,” she says.