NDP Leader Kate White presented a letter to the legislature on Tuesday with 130 signatures petitioning the Yukon government to re-think the closure of the Silver City waste transfer station.

Speaking to reporters outside the legislature, White said Community Services Minister Richard Mostyn’s current stance on the closures violates the Liberal-NDP agreement on community consultation.

“At this point in time, him saying to the media that it’s all but closed is not the consultation that was committed to in the Confidence and Supply Agreement,” White said. That two-year pact, signed last January, sees the New Democrats keep the minority Liberal government in power.

The closure is part of a broader government plan to close unstaffed rural transfer stations in favour of larger regional landfills and transfer stations that charge tipping fees.

This has stirred up almost universal opposition from local residents and the Kluane First Nation.

Yukon government officials held several community engagement meetings in late August and September to discuss these issues.

Mostyn was not at these meetings.

White said these government officials are put in a difficult position as they try to navigate community sentiment and discuss options when the minister doesn’t attend and tells the media separately that the closures are almost certain.

While acknowledging that a regional agreement with the Village of Haines Junction is still a hurdle, Mostyn was clear that the plan is closure of the Silver City transfer station.

“It will close soon,” he told reporters Tuesday. “We will cut a deal with all these municipalities.”

Kluane MLA Wade Istchenko of the Yukon Party asked Mostyn during question period Tuesday if he could point to one user group, stakeholder or other level of government that supports this closure.

Mostyn responded that some of the larger communities are in support and that the Association of Yukon Communities (AYC) were the ones who made the initial request to start this process.

But the AYC disputes this characterization, and the communities he mentioned are not in the Silver City area.

Asked again by the Star if he could name any local supporters of this plan, Mostyn didn’t respond directly, but instead defended the reasoning behind the closure plan.

“I will say this: what we are doing in the territory is improving the way that we manage all of the waste we generate as a society in the territory,” he said.