Iqaluit
capital of the territory of Nunavut, Canada
Iqaluit is the capital of the Canadian territory of Nunavut. Located on Baffin Island, it is the territory's largest community and only city, and the northernmost city in Canada. It was known as Frobisher Bay from 1942 to 1987, after the large bay on the coast on which the city is situated. Its traditional Inuktitut name was restored in 1987.
In 1999, Iqaluit was designated the capital of Nunavut after the division of the Northwest Territories into two separate territories. Before this event, Iqaluit was a small city and not well known outside the Canadian Arctic or Canada, with population and economic growth highly limited. This is due to Iqaluit's isolation and heavy dependence on expensive imported supplies, as the city, like the rest of Nunavut, has no road or rail connections to the rest of Canada, and has ship connections for only part of the year. Iqaluit has a polar climate, influenced by the cold deep waters of the Labrador Current just off Baffin Island, which makes the city cold, although it is well south of the Arctic Circle.
As of the 2021 Canadian census, the population was 7,429 (population centre: 6,991), a decrease of 4.0 per cent from the 2016 census. Iqaluit has the lowest population of any capital city in Canada.
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This entry incorporates text from “Iqaluit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.