Hunting the Northern Character

By Tony Penikett

UBC Press, 2017/347 pages

35 Accords: Re-Imagining British Columbia’s Public Sector Labour Relations

By Tony Penikett and John Calvert

Ethics International Press, 2025/382 pages

Reviewed by Thomas S. Axworthy

July 22, 2026

Tony Penikett has had one of the most interesting careers in Canadian politics. He has been an asbestos hard-rock miner, a script writer for the BBC, a union organizer, an executive assistant to NDP leader Ed Broadbent, a city councillor in Whitehorse, a member of the Yukon Legislature, Leader of the Yukon NDP, and Yukon Premier for seven-and-a-half years.

He then left partisan politics to become a deputy minister and senior public servant in Saskatchewan and British Columbia. Residuals from his 1972 BBC movie The Mad Trapper, he writes, kept him in coffee money for years.

Penikett’s success as a dramatist explains why he’s such an engaging author. He writes with the instincts of a storyteller, using vivid incidents and understated humour to illustrate larger themes.

In the difficult economic and geopolitical environment of 2026, with Donald Trump almost daily threatening to inflict more havoc on our security and well-being, two books by Penikett provide insight, historical context, and Canadian collegiality to help us understand both our woes and our opportunities.

As Trump continues to threaten Greenland with U.S. occupation (most recently at the July 2026 NATO meeting in Ankara, Turkey), the Carney government has made the Arctic a Canadian security and foreign policy priority.

Understanding the North has never been more important for Canadians and Tony Penikett’s Hunting the Northern Character is a good place to start.

The book serves as a primer on the history, demography, economy, and international context of the High Arctic.

Penikett describes well the vast changes in northern governance he has witnessed and sometimes led. For most of Canadian history, the North was ruled by a Northern Commissioner appointed by Ottawa with powers akin to a Roman proconsul.

In 1978, Penikett became a member of the first conventionally elected legislature in the Yukon, with full devolution from Ottawa being achieved for Yukon in 2003, Northwest Territories in 2014, and Nunavut in 2024.

The Territories are now provinces in all but name. “Out of sight,” from southern consciousness Penikett writes, “Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders are forging new Arctic realities.”

Hunting the Northern Character is not a memoir but Penikett uses his life in the North to illuminate, usually with humour, the challenges he describes.

One of his themes is the difference between “boomers” who come to the North for a short time to get a stake or conduct a study and the “lifers” who build communities to last. Poking fun at researchers, he jokes, the typical Inuit family is two parents, four kids and one anthropologist.

Food insecurity is one of the greatest issues in the High Arctic because climate change has melted the permafrost that served for thousands of years as a natural storage cooler (now inhabitants need freezers powered by electricity or diesel fuel.)

They had other uses too: a bear once burst into his cabin on the North Fork of the Klondike, Penikett saving himself by pulling open the trap door and jumping into the permafrost cooler, freezing in the dark until the bear finished trashing the cabin. Not many premiers have such stories.

35 Accords has a much narrower frame than the history and context of the modern North, but the necessity for negotiation and genuine consultation is at the heart of both books.

Public sector labour negotiations are never easy but to manage them amid the volatility of economic threats from an increasingly aggressive superpower only compounds the complexities.

Here, too, Penikett, in 35 Accords, draws on his experience as a negotiator outlining how successful agreements were achieved with BC unions in a time of similar stress.

In 1985, Yukon land claims negotiations began, for example, and, by 1992, Penikett’s government was able to table the Yukon Umbrella Final Agreement to enact land claims and self- government treaties with Yukon’s First Nations, including chapters on education, finance, health, land and language.

Penikett’s success as a dramatist explains why he’s such an engaging author. He writes with the instincts of a storyteller, using vivid incidents and understated humour to illustrate larger themes.

The lessons learned about patience, trust and compromise would later inform his approach to public sector negotiations in British Columbia. 35 Accords is the story of how those same lessons were applied in a different setting.

The 1990s were a difficult time for governments as a recession and cuts in federal transfers hit provincial treasuries hard. Provinces were forced to bargain toughly with their public- sector employees offering tiny increases that were below inflation.

The BC NDP government of Glen Clark was similarly boxed-in fiscally as negotiations with 240,000 public sector employees were about to begin, but to sweeten the pain, Clark offered a tradeoff that BC unions would be offered the opportunity to influence the policy agenda by suggesting reforms in areas like pension management, workplace safety concerns or other zero-cost reforms.

In 1997, Premier Clark asked Penikett, now a public servant, to lead this process assisted by researcher John Calvert — his co-author on this book — who had experienced the Bob Rae Social Contract negotiations in Ontario.

Penikett and Calvert eventually succeeded in winning acceptance of 35 accords with different union and employer groups; an impressive achievement in a time of fiscal restraint. Their book tells how that success was accomplished.

There are many lessons to be learned from this process.

The first is that not every negotiation has to be about money. There are a great many changes to improve public policy that don’t necessarily cost more.

The second is that it is often easier to have many smaller negotiations than one large one. The social contract negotiations in the United Kingdom had floundered because the unions had many different needs and issues and the one-size-fits-all or “one big idea” strategy had failed.

The third is that it was wise to run on separate tracks. The Clark government negotiated wages with the unions at the same time as Penikett was on a different track sitting down to discuss other ideas to improve services or equity.

Lastly, Penikett did not begin with a top-down reform agenda — he was not an expert in the 35 areas under discussion. The unions were asked to come up with non-costly ideas to improve things for their members and the public. This, in turn, led to much fruitful engagement within the union or employers’ groups.

The key public policy point made in the book is that “All governments confront the fact that there are far too many potential policies than they have the capacity to handle during an electoral mandate.” Governments must focus on relatively few agenda items while responding to the unforeseen crises that buffet most governments.

Genuinely opening that agenda to the concerns of key participants — whether it be First Nations or critical members of the labour movement — is a way to move forward.

But as Tony Penikett documents in these two books, it is not enough to say you are open to participation, you must work at it daily to build the trust necessary for compromise. If you do so, he and Calvert conclude in 35 Accords, you bring voice to public policy debates, which is a public investment in democracy as well as good governance.

In our polarized age, that may be the most important investment of them all.

Policy Contributing Writer Thomas S. Axworthy is Public Policy Chair at Massey College.