Premier Caroline Cochrane recounts hunt for homeless during Yellowknife evacuation

Northwest Territories Premier Caroline Cochrane said she checked to make sure homeless people weren't forgotten when the territory ordered everyone in its capital to leave.

Northwest Territories Premier Caroline Cochrane was a social worker before entering politics, so when the territory ordered everyone in its capital to leave last week due to encroaching wildfires, she said she checked to make sure homeless people weren’t forgotten.

“My heart’s with those people. I’ve worked in that field for over 20 years,” Cochrane told an online news conference about the firefighting efforts over the weekend, when she was asked about government plans to keep in touch with Yellowknife’s homeless.

Cochrane, who is among the nearly 70 per cent of N.W.T. residents forced to flee the fire threat, responded that the government worked closely with shelters in the city of about 20,000 to make sure people were being brought to the evacuation centre.

But she said she knew that many of the most vulnerable people — in fact, most of them — don’t use the shelter all of the time.

“On Thursday morning, I drove to the shelter — the women’s shelter at that time because I know a lot of them because of my past — and I realized that there were some that were still on the street.”

“From Thursday morning, from 8 in the morning until after midnight — the whole day — I recruited one of the homeless men and we drove through Yellowknife, over and over, to every single place, trying to find people.”

“We were going into places I normally would not go, behind buildings, into bushes.”

Cochrane said she wanted to give a shout-out to the man from the Sahtu region. By midnight, she said, they’d managed to find about a dozen people and get them to an evacuation centre.