Make that 10,000+

More than 10,000 people answered the call for written feedback on the Peel watershed land use plan, according to Yukon government statistics released the day before MLAs return to the legislature.

And more than 800 people attended one of the eight open house meetings held in Yukon and N.W.T communities over the winter.

This is the first information the tight-lipped government has shared since it began its public consultation on the final recommended Peel land use plan nearly five months ago.

And while the statistics are dense with detail on how people submitted comments and from where, they don’t say boo about what they had to say.

CPAWS-Yukon’s said recently its records show more than 7,500 of those 10,000+ people urged the government to support the commission’s plan which protects most of the watershed.

That’s about 75-80 per cent, the same result as the 2010 consultation.

But since the government still hasn’t posted any of the submissions it received to its website as promised, there’s no way to verify its numbers.

It says only: “The release of the participation statistics will be followed by the posting of public comments on the government’s consultation website as well as a What We Heard document, summarizing the comments received.”

It doesn’t say when that might happen or why it's taking so long.

According to the figures it did release, it received 763 submissions by email, 14 by fax, 201 by mail and 10 by voice mail.

Six hundred and thirty five people filled out the online feedback form but only 175 filled out that same form, which was mailed to all Yukon households as well as to the four affected N.W.T. communities.  

Another 304 people left written comments at the open houses – either filling out the government questionnaire or scrawling their thoughts on brightly-coloured giant sticky notes.

More than 7,500 people signed petitions or form letters circulated by conservation groups and Yukon First Nations. A postcard campaign by the Yukon Chamber of Mines had 299 participants.

The government figures don't include oral submissions made during the open house meetings or any one-on-one conversations with officials during those events. They were held in Whitehorse, Dawson City, Mayo, Old Crow, Aklavik, Inuvik, Tsiigehtchic and Fort McPherson.

Officials also met with a number of groups and organizations during the consultation period but there is no information about these meetings.

However the number crunchers did go to great lengths to separate the written submissions by territory and country, even assigning detailed percentages to each individual item.

Yukon Party government MLAs are expected to lean heavily on these location details to fend off questions from the opposition when the legislature resumes sitting on Thursday.

Conservation groups are planning to welcome MLAs back to work with a “River of Names” march from downtown Whitehorse to the legislative assembly on Second Avenue. It begins at the Old Firehall at 11:30 a.m.

They’ll be delivering a banner bearing the names of the more than 7,500 people who told the government they support the Peel commission's plan.