The Yukon Government may as well have a 'Department of Dog Mushing' judging by the millions of dollars the Department of Tourism puts into sled dog exploitation - close to $2 million for Yukon Quest race promotion and race prize money over the past several years, untold amounts of money to Discovery Channel and Outdoor Life Network (and others) for dog mushing propaganda film productions.

The Tourism Association of Yukon lobby group has the owner of a large sled dog tour operation as its Chair, the board includes representatives of the Yukon Quest and Yukon Outfitting industry.

Yukon Tourism/Yukon Quest/Yukon sled dog tour operators are positively rubbing their greedy little hands together in anticipation of spinoff business from the Vancouver 2010 Olympics!

'Tourism officials market Yukon imagery to Olympics broadcasters' - CBC News, March 23, 2009

A free dogsled trip for some television network executives may pay off for Yukon tourism officials, who hope the networks will use Yukon scenery as the backdrop for their Winter Olympics coverage next year.

Officials from TV networks covering the Olympics were in the Yukon earlier this month on a dogsledding adventure trip paid for by the Canadian Tourism Commission.

"They were so excited by their trip to the Yukon that we have commitments from all of them to bring a crew up here to the Yukon to shoot additional footage," Denny Kobayashi, marketing manager with the Yukon's Tourism and Culture Department, told CBC News.

"We're going to be in front of 200 [million] to 300 million people as a result of this coverage."

Executives who came up for the sled-dog trip included a producer from NBC, the head of an Australian network, and the producer in charge of Olympics coverage for CTV.

Kobayashi said he expects images of the Yukon's rugged scenery will form the background images for those networks' Olympics programs, even though the Olympics themselves will be held in Vancouver and Whistler, B.C.

"They were blown away by how the experience was so uniquely Canadian that they said, 'Boy, this is the story that we want to tell about Canada,'" he said.

"With all due respect to our good friends in Vancouver, they are a very urban, multimillion-person city. And how people see Canada, Yukon has to offer. This is what these folks want to show to their audiences around the world."

Kobayashi said he expects the Tourism Department will spend about $5,000 each to show film crews from the three networks around the territory.