CANADA COURIER: Canada's northern Ukrainian (11/03/96)

CANADA COURIER

by Christopher Guly

Canada's northern Ukrainian

It's fall in Ottawa and the chill of imminent snow is in the air.

More than 2,000 miles away, above British Columbia in the Yukon, it's already snowing. For John Ostashek, the premature snowflakes marked a bad start to the Yukon's usually warmer autumn. On the last day of September, the 60-year-old Ukrainian Canadian's Yukon Party government was defeated at the polls.

The left-of-center New Democratic Party won 10 of the Yukon's 17 legislative seats. Pending the outcome of a judicial recount where the Yukon Party and NDP candidates were tied with 68 seats apiece, Mr. Ostashek may become the territory's opposition leader if he can get that contentious seat and bring his party's tally to four seats over the Liberals' three. (He held on to his suburban Whitehorse riding of Porter Creek North.)

Small comfort for the Alberta-born politician - whose family originated in Crimea - who had led the Yukon since 1992.

An outfitter by trade, Mr. Ostashek came to the Klondike land of gold mining almost a quarter-century ago. The picturesque Jasper area of Alberta was getting too crowded for him. So he went west and north, and settled in Yukon's capital city of Whitehorse, while maintaining a getaway 200 miles west in a place called Kluane Lake.

The son of a coal miner, Mr. Ostashek mixed his outdoor business interests with a passion for politics. In 1977, he became a founding member of the Yukon Party.

When the territory held its first party-system election the following year, the federal Progressive Conservatives threw some money the Yukon Party's way. With that, the Tories added their name to the party and the Yukon Progressive Conservative Party took power until 1985 when voters switched to the NDP.

But, when the federal Conservatives' fortunes diminished during their years in government under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Mr. Ostashek campaigned to revert the party's name back to its original Yukon Party. In 1991, he became its leader. In 1992, he led the party to its first victory and became government leader of Yukon.

Unlike those living in the 10 Canadian provinces, residents of the country's two territories - the Yukon and the Northwest Territories - sparsely populate a vast area larger than France. In the Yukon's case, 32,000 people over 200,000 square miles - or about six people for every square mile.

Given such a small electoral base, there is no diffusing political decisions.

Part of Mr. Ostashek's success in the early 1990s was reminding Yukoners that six of the territory's mines had shut down during the NDP's seven years in power.

Part of Mr. Ostashek's failure, perhaps, was in being too strict a fiscal conservative. Faced with a $64 million deficit - larger on a per-capita basis than the federal government's annual deficit - which they inherited from the NDP, the Yukon Party set to trim some fat. Employee wages were rolled back by two percentage points over three years.

On September 30, Yukoners remembered that and temporarily forgot about Mr. Ostashek's government record in reducing unemployment by 10 percent to seven (two points lower than the national average) and creating the Yukon as Canada's sole political jurisdiction that could claim debt-free status.

"What happened here is what happened in Ontario when the NDP were elected in the early 1990s," said Mr. Ostashek over the telephone from his Whitehorse office. "Nobody expected the NDP to win, but they did."

Now, the Yukon has a new leader, the NDP's Piers McDonald, and the territory's most visible Ukrainian Canadian is relegated to the opposition ranks in the legislature.

But Mr. Ostashek, who only spoke Ukrainian until he was 5 years old, plans to keep up the fight and remain in his northern climbs. "The Yukon is my home," he insists. "I always have a place here."