G-7 heads deep into the Arctic

February 4, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

IQALUIT, Nunavut (AP) — This Canadian Arctic capital has no stop lights 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 G-7 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 lies on Baffin Island and is the capital of what in 1999 became Nunavut, a Western-Europe-sized chunk of 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 the finance ministers and central bankers of the G-7 governments heavy-duty parkas. That should make for quite a photo op.

Lesser officials will have to paw through their closets for their warmest clothes. And though lodgings are sufficient for the delegations, journalists who couldn’t get a hotel room are being lodged in college dorms or with families.

David Phillips, Canada’s chief weatherman, forecasts weekend sunshine and calm weather, but the government has contingency plans to move the meeting 2,000 miles south to Ottawa. Phillips, who calls Iqaluit the blizzard capital of Canada, warns that the weather can turn on a dime.

“I’ve been in this business for 40-some years. I have 25,000 weather stories about weird, wild and wacky weather, about venues that people just miscalculated about the weather,” Phillips said. And he finds the choice of Iqaluit a bit puzzling. “I still scratch my head thinking, well, what was behind this?”

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty acknowledged 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.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made the Arctic a priority, pledging to increase Canada’s military presence in the Northwest Passage in case enough ice melts to make it a regular Atlantic-Pacific shipping lane. Canada says it owns the passage. The U.S. and others say it’s international territory.

Canada and Denmark have staked claims to tiny Hans island at the entrance to the Northwest Passage, and on the other side of North America, the offshore Alaska-Canada border is disputed.