IQALUIT, Nunavut — This Canadian Arctic capital has no stoplights and didn’t start naming its streets until a decade ago.
Blizzards can last a week or more, and they tend to come very suddenly. So when the financial chiefs of the seven big industrial democracies meet here Friday and Saturday, they’d better have a quick way out.
Iqaluit, population 7,000, may seem an unlikely venue for a G7 bull session about the global economy, but the host nation chose it in part to underscore a message about sovereignty over its part of the Arctic.
Climate change is altering the Arctic geography by melting ice and creating open waterways, and with them new access to a bonanza of minerals, petroleum and polar shipping routes. This has led to a welter of conflicting claims by Canada’s neighbors, including Russia.
Iqaluit (pronounced ee-KAL-oo-eet), which lies on Baffin Island, is the capital of what in 1999 became Nunavut, a Western Europe-sized chunk of the Arctic with a small measure of self-government for the 85 percent Inuit population of 35,000.
Average February temperatures fall to minus-25 degrees Fahrenheit, and that’s not counting wind chill.
So the Canadians will give heavy- duty parkas to the finance ministers and central bankers of the Group of Seven governments. That should make for quite a photo op.
Lesser officials will have to paw through their closets for their warmest clothes. And while lodgings are sufficient for the delegations, journalists who couldn’t get a hotel room are being lodged in college dorms or with families.
“I still scratch my head thinking, well, what was behind this?” Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said, acknowledging in an interview with The Associated Press that apart from wanting to showcase the charms of Nunavut (Inuit for “Our Land”), Canada is sending a diplomatic message about a territory that may contain one-fifth of the world’s petroleum reserves.
“It’s one of our government’s priorities, the assertion of our sovereignty in the Arctic,” Flaherty said.
