What is Iqaluit?

Iqaluit is the capital and largest community of Nunavut, with a population of about 7,500. The community is on the southeast coast of Baffin Island on Frobisher Bay, an inlet of Davis Strait that connects to the Atlantic Ocean. Iqaluit has been the territorial capital since the creation of Nunavut on April 1, 1999. The name Iqaluit means 'place of many fish' in Inuktitut, referring to the Arctic char fishery in nearby rivers.

The community was founded as Frobisher Bay in 1942, when the United States Army Air Forces built an airfield there as a stopover point on the Crimson Route, an air-ferry route to Europe during the Second World War. The airfield (now Iqaluit International Airport, with one of the longest runways in the Canadian Arctic at 2,624 metres) became a Distant Early Warning Line site during the Cold War. Permanent Inuit settlement expanded in the 1950s and 1960s as families relocated from surrounding hunting camps. The community was renamed from Frobisher Bay to Iqaluit on January 1, 1987, in advance of the Nunavut creation.

Iqaluit is the principal hub for federal, territorial, and Inuit-organisation services in Nunavut. The Government of Nunavut Legislative Assembly Building (an architecturally distinctive design opened in 1999), the Nunavut Court of Justice, the Iqaluit Regional Hospital (which serves 27 of Nunavut's 25 communities), and Arctic College are based in the city. Inuktitut is the dominant language alongside English and French. The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement of 1993, the largest Indigenous land claim in Canadian history, established Inuit co-management of resources and Crown land across the territory.

Iqaluit's economy centres on government, the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami national Inuit organisation, the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, retail and services, the Iqaluit International Airport (the principal Nunavut gateway), tourism (Auyuittuq National Park is accessible from Pangnirtung north of Iqaluit), and the small-scale Pangnirtung commercial turbot fishery. Iqaluit has the Frobisher Inn, the Discovery Lodge, and several other accommodations. The community runs on diesel power and is supplied entirely by sealift in summer and air freight in winter; there are no roads or rail connections to any other community in Nunavut or the rest of Canada. Climate change is rapidly affecting Iqaluit, with shrinking sea ice, permafrost thaw affecting buildings, and changing wildlife distributions all documented since the 1990s.