Yukon Legislature cancels Thursday sitting after partial power outage

The Yukon Legislative Assembly cancelled its sitting on Thursday after a part of the building's electrical system failed the day before.

The failure, which caused a partial power outage, happened shortly after representatives from the Yukon Energy Corporation and Yukon Development Corporation started taking questions from politicians in the assembly Wednesday afternoon. 

Assembly clerk Dan Cable, in an interview, said the electrical system tripped about a week ago and staff were able to restart it, but that attempts to do the same on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning were unsuccessful.

Some lights and the ceiling fans are still working, but there wasn't enough capacity to power all necessary electronics.

The assembly has ordered a replacement for the part that failed and a backup, which are expected to arrive in Whitehorse Friday. Electricians will then repair and test the system through the weekend, with the goal of getting it fully running again by Monday. 

Cable said the assembly would be taking measures to avoid tripping the system again for the rest of the sitting, including keeping lights off when possible. He also said the Yukon government is looking at medium and long-term fixes.

"The system is an old system," he explained, noting that it dated back to the 1970s.

"At the time, the amount of draw on our electrical systems was much less… The advent of the computer was still 20 years away for offices, and certainly server farms like the one we have for all of our data, they didn't exist back then. All of that is putting an extra draw on our system and so it's sort of near maximum capacity." 

The assembly lost approximately an hour-and-a-half of time Wednesday and a whole sitting day Thursday because of the outage.

Cable said MLAs are considering making up for the lost day on April 25 — a Friday, which the assembly usually takes off — and are discussing the possibility of recalling the Yukon Energy and Yukon Development Corporation witnesses on another date.