RUTH HEADLEY is sorting through “notions”—the plastic rulers and pattern shapes used in quilt making. A sewing machine whirs in the background as she puts together an order for new pins and needles in between visiting with clients who come to sew on the fancy machines at her Whitehorse shop, Bear’s Paw Quilts. It’s stocked with bright blankets, rolls of fabric—and a baseball bat. The sewing supplies are for sale, but not the bat. It’s for the shoplifters.
Headley has had 12 quilts stolen over the years. She told the police if she catches a thief in her shop again, she’s using that baseball bat. “They told me I couldn’t do that,” she says. “So, I told them, ‘Fine, then I’ll use a two-by-four.’” Crime is the kind of thing Headley, who’s in her 70s, would like to see addressed as a chamber of commerce member, if she had any plans to become one again. Her experience with the Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce amounted to little more than another expense when she first paid her dues and joined some two decades ago. Chamber meetings were held during the day, when Headley, a solo entrepreneur, was working in her shop, so she couldn’t attend. “I rang them up and said, ‘Tell me what I get for my money,’ and they said ‘Well, you get a sticker for your window.’” To which Headley said, “I don’t mean to be snotty, but we don’t have a window, we’re in a basement.”
To be blunt, “I felt like I got nothing out of it,” she says in her British accent. “The most important thing seemed to be the sticker there wasn’t much else.”
There may have to be something else if the territory’s municipal chambers want to avoid dissolving the way the Yukon Chamber of Commerce did in June 2025. The 40-year-old organization, whose revenue came mainly from its membership base, was no longer financially sustainable. Since then, the Yukon First Nation Chamber of Commerce has formed a coalition with the chambers of Whitehorse, Dawson City and St. Elias in Haines Junction. Together, they offer Yukon businesses broader representation across the territory, while individually focusing on issues particular to their member communities. The challenge is how to be all thigns to all members, especially in an increasingly competitive and volatile economic climate where businesses have more specialized interests than ever. To remain viable, chambers may need to shift their gaze from overarching concerns such as Arctic sovereignty and critical mineral strategies to more pressing day-to-day issues facing local businesses, such as crime.
“THIS IS THE TIP of the iceberg,” says Patti Balsillie, who was executive director of the Yukon Chamber when it shut down. She thinks its closure is a sign of what’s to come. “There have been people fighting the good fight,” she says. “But there’s too much noise in the market.”
When the Yukon Chamber was established in the 1980s, it had a strong purpose—reflecting the business community’s unified voice and advocating for its very homogenous interests. Back then, Whitehorse had one traffic light, there were almost no women in business and First Nation self-government agreements were in their infancy. The chamber was the only game in town. Today, there are more than 600 Yukon NGOs representing a raft of exclusive interests, and organizations have splintered off because people want strong, clear platforms. The Yukon Contractors Association formed to address government procurement policy; the Wilderness Tourism Association of the Yukon was established to focus on land and water conservation issues without the distraction of talk about taxation, labour and marketing data.
Even Balsillie, who runs her own business as a management consultant and has worked for both the Whitehorse and Yukon chambers, isn’t currently a chamber member. She knows the Whitehorse Chamber is involved in programs and conversations around Arctic security and investment, but she’s not looking for an advocacy voice. Instead, she joined Mediation Yukon, a society more aligned with her field. The main reason she’d be tempted to join the Whitehorse Chamber is its Business After Hours events.
IT’S -41°C and the parking lot at the Yukon Transportation Museum is so packed that vehicles are parked all the way down to the Alaska Highway. Inside, women in sequined gowns and men in everything from three-piece suits to work boots and jeans are standing around tall tables with candy cane lamps and munching on fancy hors d’oeuvres. JP Pinard, a wind energy expert, nurses a Yukon Brewing cocktail made with beer and cranberries. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, he’s noticed people disconnecting from community. People are so used to online platforms such as Zoom that they’ve stopped having face-to-face meetings. He thinks the emotional intelligence of Canadians has dropped as a result, and it’s why he thinks events such as After Hours are so important. Pinard spends part of the evening talking with folks from Air North about the public shares the company used to buy its new Boeing 737-800s. He’s hoping to do something similar to bankroll his wind farm, Wind Heat North. You don’t bump into someone at a Zoom meeting and accidentally have conversations like these, he says, though, if no one invites you to After Hours, you can’t have those conversations either.
Teresa Ward has faithfully paid her $173 in chamber dues for years, but she says she doesn’t hear about many chamber events. “I know they put on lots of things, but I don’t feel I’m being reached out to enough,” says the owner of Grandma Treesaw’s Bannock. She joined the chamber because she hoped having her name on its list of vendors would bring in more catering gigs, but she says she hasn’t noticed much difference. If she’d heard about the Christmas party via an email list, she would have gone, but there isn’t an email list. There’s also not, in her opinion, enough of a social media presence showcasing local businesses.
FOR JUSTINE HOBBS, local businesses are the backbone of the community. As president of the Dawson City Chamber of Commerce, Hobbs puts in 20-hour weeks at a job that pays her for only 12. That’s on top of her work as a small business owner, working as a consultant and cultural producer. She says small businesses help give Dawson its character. Besides a Home Hardware and a couple of hotels and banks, you won’t find franchises of most Dawson storefronts anywhere else in Canada. Toronto doesn’t have an Old Man General Contracting; Whitehorse doesn’t have a Pan of Gold Pizza, Pasta and Subs; and Halifax doesn’t have a Drunken Goat. “It is so cool to walk around the downtown core and see all the unique businesses,” Hobbs says. “To lose those would be really hard for us.”
Michael Pealow feels the same way. As president of the St. Elias Chamber of Commerce, he says unique businesses are part of what make chambers relevant. The territory is full of people serving and creating employment in their communities, despite systems that work against them, he says, including cuts to nominee programming, making it next to impossible for businesses in rural communities to find staff. One of the biggest things chambers can do is help them co-ordinate and communicate what’s working and what’s not to the people making policy. The Yukon Public Utilities Act, for instance, disincentivizes investment in electricity generation and distribution infrastructure, which Pealow says the coalition is actively lobbying to have changed. The Yukon government has more than 100 policy advisors. Pealow says they can make better recommendations—and do better research—if they’re getting good information from a variety of perspectives. The coalition agrees.
At an individual level, the St. Elias Chamber is working with the Yukon government and the municipality to make derelict lots more accessible for new businesses, while the Dawson chamber is more focused on food sovereignty, negotiating the road weight restrictions that directly impact the cost of groceries coming up the highway. But the coalition is also fielding common shared concerns from members, including staffing and labour supply issues, housing constraints and energy challenges. These are examples of issues that don’t just affect how Yukon businesses are doing but how the Yukon is doing as a whole, according to Pealow. His aspiration is to present well-researched, well-informed positions that are good for the business community and the territory.
One area where the community chambers diverge from the Whitehorse chamber is that Dawson and St. Elias have no problem signing up businesses. In part, this is because membership fees are low ($50-$75 annually), and both offer affordable life and health insurance plans to members. Annual dues for the Whitehorse chamber range from $173 to $1,819, depending on how many staff members businesses employ. It offers insurance, too, but, in the capital city, some small businesses face bigger struggles.
WILLOW GAMBERG’S old music shop was broken into six times. She lost thousands of dollars as a result. Most of these thefts fell just under Gamberg’s insurance deductible, though the worst set her back $10,000 (individual friends and businesses raised money and wrote cheques to help her recover). Gamberg owns Road Dogs Music. She’s not a chamber member, but she signed up for its Yukoner Appreciation Week event in October, where local shops offer customers free food, drinks and discounts. She participated for the first time in 2025 because she’d moved into a new space on Main Street and timed it with her grand opening.
At the Chamber’s Christmas After Hours event, its president, Marcos Castillo, told the crowd Yukoner Appreciation Week reached new levels of engagement in 2025. Gamberg says the event helped raise awareness of Road Dogs’ new space, but it wasn’t what she would call worthwhile. Sure, it brought people into the store, but she had to pay $200 to be part of it, she says. For that, her business was included in the event’s app and a contest that awarded prizes to patrons. Then she had to pay for advertising and all the evening’s alcohol. “You give away the booze for free and all the people buy stuff at discounts,” she says. “So, you’re sort of hemorrhaging money.” Overall, Gamberg says, she’s not confident in what the chamber can do for local business owners.
“I haven’t felt a lot of support,” she says. “But to be fair, I also haven’t reached out and been like, ‘What can you do for us?’”
DURING THE CHRISTMAS After Hours event, Castillo mentioned the speed with which the world is changing and how ideas about the Yukon’s future are also shifting. “We have had to adapt, rethink approaches and keep our eye on what is emerging around the North,” he says. To that end, the chamber hosted an Arctic Summit in February, focused on sovereignty, security, infrastructure and critical resources. The North is now viewed as vital to Canada and the world, he says. “That reality guides every meeting we enter for advocacy, every program we design and every event we plan.”
Broadly, that focus speaks to the vision of the chamber’s bigger members, particularly those working in contracting, security and resource extraction. Smaller storefront businesses that are dealing with break-ins, shoplifting and more niche concerns, however, may not find a conference on Arctic sovereignty as relevant. If it alienates too many of its members, the coalition of chambers, like the former territorial chamber, could lose local businesses to more specialized organizations that serve their unique interests.
Headley, for example, isn’t that concerned with AI or critical minerals. She wants to see legislation banning known shoplifters from her premises. It’s something Yukon trespass laws currently don’t address. Some local businesses have created “walls of shame” posting pictures of shoplifters behind their tills. If the chamber took up the cause, says Headley, maybe she would consider becoming a member again. In the meantime, she has her baseball bat.
