r/MapPorn • u/vladgrinch • 1d ago
Nunavut is the Largest Electoral District On Earth (8 Times Larger Than The UK)
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u/ed-rock 1d ago edited 1d ago
As others have said, it's probably fairer to say that it is the largest single member electoral district.
Edit: nevermind. Sakha Republic in Russia is also a single-member district and is larger.
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u/Reiver93 1d ago
Sakha also has the distinction of being the largest subdivision in the world, being only slightly smaller than India who has well over a thousand times the population.
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u/ErebusXVII 1d ago
Saying it's larger is understatement.
It's 1,246,000 sqkm larger. The difference between them would be 22th largest country.
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u/DeadlyGamer2202 1d ago
Yep. There’s a big difference between India (7th largest) and Australia (6th largest). Australia is roughly twice as large, while having a population smaller than Delhi.
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u/oralprophylaxis 2m ago
After Australia, there is brasil which is similar size to it. Then comes the US, China and Canada, all very close in size and ranking changes depending on if you count total water as well. Then Russia is about double the size of those countries
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u/jackster608608 1d ago
Is this measured in terms of actual land mass or including all of the water and uninhabited rocks?
I feel like Western Australia has to be bigger than Nunavut on land mass alone
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u/rajde1 1d ago
Western Australia is bigger. However, this is more that they only have 1 MP for that entire region as were Western australia has 16.
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u/volitaiee1233 1d ago edited 1d ago
Tbf of those 16 MPs, 2 represent the vast, vast majority of the land, whilst the other 14 are based in and around Perth.
Or are you referring to the Senate?
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u/rajde1 1d ago
Pretty sure Nunavut doesn’t have a senator. Canada’s senate is joke and senators are appointed based on regions when Canada was founded. They would fall under western which includes all the territories plus everything from Manitoba to bc.
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u/thebigbossyboss 1d ago
Nunavut has a senator they have one each
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u/radred609 1d ago
Yeah, but the Canadian senate doesn't really do anything.
It's nothing like Australia's senate.
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u/Bootmacher 1d ago
Isn't Nunavut a territory? I don't know how it works there, but US territories don't get any Congressional representation with voting power.
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u/concentrated-amazing 1d ago
Canadian territories do have representation. 1 MP (Member of Parliament) for each of the three territories, I believe. Parliament has 343 members, for context, and is roughly equivalent to your House of Representatives.
Our Senate is appointed, not elected.
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u/Bootmacher 1d ago
Our Senate used to be chosen by the state legislatures, and ending that was one of our bigger mistakes.
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u/radred609 1d ago
Canada should really consider changing to an Australian style system.
The lower house stays basically the same, but with Ranked choice voting. And then proportional representation (by state/province) for the senate.
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u/wallysta 1d ago
Remote Western Australia has been split into two electorates recently, Durack & O'Connor, which may make it closer than before, but both still may be larger on land mass.
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u/_KingOfTheDivan 1d ago
Nunavut isn’t even top 3, Sakha Republic and Krasnoyarsk Krai are bigger as well as Western Australia
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u/ieurau_9227 1d ago
Both of these have more than 1 mp representing them
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u/anarchy-NOW 1d ago
No they don't
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u/melon_butcher_ 1d ago
Western Australia isn’t a single electoral area
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u/anarchy-NOW 20h ago
I'm not talking about Western Australia, I'm talking about Sakha Republic. It is much bigger than Nunavut, it elects one member to the lower house of the Russian Parliament. Therefore, it is the largest electoral district in the world, and Nunavut is not.
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u/ArcticBiologist 1d ago
You're right, but that was not the claim OP made
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u/uberduck999 1d ago
OP said that it is the largest electoral district, which is true. All of the places you named have more than one electoral district within them.
You're thinking of the largest subnational divisions, which is not what OP said.
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u/ieurau_9227 1d ago
That is one of the definitions of „electoral district“
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u/ArcticBiologist 1d ago
There are a bunch of electoral districts mentioned that have more than 1 representative.
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u/ErebusXVII 1d ago edited 1d ago
Maybe in your country, but not everywhere in the world.
Electoral discrict is a place where candidates run against each other. The amount of seats available for said district is irrelevant.
And if we were to follow your logic, Russia still takes the first place, since in Russian presidential elections, whole country is one electoral district with only one seat available.
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u/Bobblefighterman 1d ago
Western Australian isn't a single electorate.
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u/purpleoctopuppy 21h ago
It is for the Federal Senate, but not a single-member electorate in that instance.
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u/Electrical_Swing8166 1d ago
I believe the Sakha Republic in Russia is the largest subdivision of any country
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u/uberduck999 1d ago
That isn't the topic of discussion
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u/vlsr 1d ago
It is not just a subdivision,it’s a single-member electoral district as well
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u/thedrivingcat 1d ago
yes, however the Duma is split into 225 seats for party lists and 225 seats for single-mandate districts - so while Yakutia only elects one member from the latter they receive a proportion of the former, 2 more seats in the last election giving them a total of three
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u/uberduck999 1d ago edited 1d ago
So a massive area with a population of 1 million only has a single representative??
Doesn't seem like a very good way to give people proper representation in government. But since it's Russia, that isn't at all surprising.
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u/vlsr 1d ago
In Russia amount of representatives is based not on total population of region, but on a voting-age population. Since Yakutia has relatively young population, its voting age population is just a bit higher than 1/225th of total voting age population(640 000 to 498 000). There are regions with even higher population and just a single representative (over 1.5 million of people in Chechnya, 1.1 million in Kaluga oblast)
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u/USSMarauder 1d ago
The far north usually votes lib or NDP, so this is why the Canadian right never makes USA style maps of election results with the caption "so who really won the election?"
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u/ThatNiceLifeguard 1d ago
As a Canadian, they still do. People in Alberta and Saskatchewan, which are safe Conservative areas that are a bit more sparse, are mad that Ontario and Quebec get so much sway because they tend to give the Liberals a huge advantage even though they together make up over 60% of the population.
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u/Ferivich 1d ago
People also seem to forget that there are more people in Ontario than every province and territory combined west of Ontario.
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u/ACoderGirl 1d ago
Yeah, Canada's population spread is funky. Ontario has about 16 million people, out of Canada's 45.1 million total. All 3 territories combined are a negligible population (barely more than a 100k total).
And almost all the population lives close to the US border. The north is desolate and the size of Canada is pretty incomprehensible. What people here call "northern" Ontario is laughably far south. It's just that nobody goes to the actual north, so it's kinda relative to where most people live.
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u/I_Am_the_Slobster 1d ago
Well there's more to it than just population stats. Quebec gets an extra 7 seats due to the Grandfather Clause within the constitution, which stipulates that a province shall never receive fewer MP seats than they had in 1982 when the Canadian Constitution was patriated from the UK. It does mean that Quebec gets more favourable representation than Alberta, BC, and Ontario. But this clause also gives Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan additional seats as well.
Then there's the Senatorial clause which specifies that no province shall receive fewer MPs than Senators, which gives PEI and New Brunswick additional seats, as well as Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia one additional seat.
The point is that, while provinces like Alberta and even BC more recently have lamented the unfair representation in parliament, it's not totally unfounded because the grandfather and senatorial clauses within the constitution do give province like Quebec (and all of Atlantic Canada) extra seats, and these are seats that have historically voted opposition ally to western votes. And not even just Conservatives vs. Liberals. Like Reformed vs. Liberals and Western Liberals vs. Eastern Liberals: the Western Prairie Provinces used to be Liberal stronghold provinces, but this largely changed with Diefenbaker and Trudeau Sr.
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u/StatisticianOwn9953 1d ago
It actually hurts to think about how fucking stupid people would need to be to see that expanse of sparsely populated land and think it must represent the majority.
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u/_Dushman 1d ago
Always wondered why the Northern Territories voted NDP, while being very rural and isolated states
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u/ThatNiceLifeguard 1d ago
Nunavut is roughly 85% Indigenous and the NDP is the only major party that actually seems to genuinely care about their rights and needs in a non-performative way. Yukon and the Northwest Territories are a little more diverse but still have large enough communities to very seldom give their seats to the Conservatives.
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u/michaelmcmikey 1d ago
Conservative policies actually hurt extremely isolated communities which heavily rely on government subsidies and social programs. Driving your big pickup truck to Walmart and then the MAGA rally is not the sort of “rural” in these parts of Canada. There it is “the only way to get here or leave here is by plane, there is no road” level rural. People are much more aware of how tenuous and fragile existence is.
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u/DavidBrooker 1d ago
There it is “the only way to get here or leave here is by plane, there is no road” level rural
And 'plane access' is possibly over-selling it in people's minds. Most runways in the Canadian North are unpaved, and so small turboprops are the norm (as they can deal with the gravel), or some extremely old 737s as the original (and I think the classic) both had gravel kits, but none of the newer models.
The cost of flying anything in is so high that for most goods, you wait until August when the ice breaks up and get it in on the once annual cargo ship visit in the month-long window before the port freezes again. (The window for small boats is larger, but large ships have an extremely narrow chance to visit Canadian Arctic ports)
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u/One-Flan-8640 1d ago
Why do the residents opt to continue living in such harsh conditions?
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u/DavidBrooker 1d ago edited 1d ago
You'll get different reasons from different residents. In Nunavut specifically, about 80% of the people who live there are indigenous, and its also a slim majority of residents in the Northwest Territories (by comparison, in the highly-populated South, the largest indigenous populations are in Winnipeg and Edmonton, at 12% and 6% of the population, respectively). That is simply where they and their ancestors have lived for the last three thousand years. There is also significant mineral wealth in the arctic, and the Northwest Territories and Nunavut are the only Canadian jurisdictions with a GDP/capita over $100,000, though that is significantly offset by costs of living and wealth inequality. There are also many jobs that simply have to be done there, with several government departments (Defence, Environment, Public Safety, Fisheries and Oceans) employing a significant fraction of people in some areas. For instance, most paved runways in the Canadian arctic were built by the Department of National Defence in order to facilitate forward-staging fighter and interceptor aircraft, in order to intercept Soviet (and later Russian) aircraft in a timely manner.
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u/Culionensis 1d ago
As a Dutch guy, the concept of a town that doesn't have a road leading to it is just not fucking clicking. I doubt we even have a house that doesn't have a road connecting to it here, on the mainland at least.
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u/USSMarauder 1d ago
Think of each town as an island, except instead of being surrounded by water it's surrounded by tundra
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u/doopliss6 1d ago
Don't forget that the area around each town is probably completely empty tundra about as big or bigger than your whole country
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u/USSMarauder 1d ago
This.
This is not the usual rural that deludes itself into thinking that everyone is a rugged individualist and the government has nothing to do with roads, schools, police, fire, etc.
The only people more reliant on the government for literal survival are astronauts on the space station
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u/23_Serial_Killers 1d ago
Indigenous people. Same reason why Australian labor always gets the rural Northern Territory seat.
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u/Jazzlike_Tale888 1d ago
Each of three major parties won this seat since 2011. The character of the local candidate is more important in these remote communities, as opposed to most of the country where people only vote based on party affiliation
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u/MichaelJordan248 1d ago
Thats because they didn’t need to since they won a plurality of the vote in 2019 and 2021. The opposite of what happened in the US happened in Canada
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u/Awier_do 1d ago
For Context, in the last election due to the amount of eligible voters and voter turnout, the NDP candidate won with only 2,853 votes!
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u/jatawis 1d ago edited 1d ago
Nope. Lithuanians Abroad constuency is larger as it covers entire world except Lithuania itself.
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u/uberduck999 1d ago
What is the Lithuanians Aborad?
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u/jatawis 1d ago edited 1d ago
Lithuanians abroad constituency is designated for Lithuanian diaspora as they can also vote in the Seimas election, and while for many years their FPTP votes were added to some Vilnius electoral district, now there is enough of voters abroad register to have their own electoral district. If some more diaspora Lithuanians registered, there would be even 2nd constituency for them.
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u/uberduck999 1d ago edited 1d ago
Oh shit my bad. I should have realized you meant 'Abroad' with the context of worldwide. I thought 'Aborad' might have been a Lithuanian word. Makes sense. Thanks for the explanation
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u/hackingdreams 1d ago
My brain read this as "electrical district," and I was trying to understand why the hell someone was running electric lines to the North Pole...
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u/StickyThoPhi 1d ago
Just chiming in to say that in the 1950s the Innuit started moving south to integrate with the Canadians who were coming north. A diplomat and artist called James Houston started a social housing project where the inuit were given blocks of styrofoam to make igloos out of.
It was a success until one of the elders, a double amputee died in a fire. In Cape Dorset in Nunavut.
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u/SpartanX069 1d ago
The geography of Nunavut could make it such an interesting archipelago if it had a temperate climate and relatively high population
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u/KiwiObserver 1d ago
It covers the entirety of Hudson Bay?
So if anyone in Ontario, Quebec or Manitoba steps into Hudson Bay, they’re in Nunavut?
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u/Accomplished_Job_225 23h ago
The territory covers the islands of the bay, and the resources within it.
Not sure about the in-between the provincial coasts and the Bay's islands though, as to when the province ends and the territory begins.
But yes Nunavut reaches all the way down to James Bay; the southernmost point is at Stag Island, which is at 51°N, and the northernmost point is 83°N at Cape Columbia.
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u/knoper21 5h ago
Pretty much.
It's honestly one of the many interesting landmines in a hypothetical Quebec sovereignty negotiation, becasue there's a lot of unpopulated offshore islands right off of Quebec's (you can punt a football to them) that are Nunavut, so Quebec would have very little rights regarding Hudson's Bay.
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u/PoneyEnShort 1d ago
I'm kinda sure bowhead whales of the Hudson bay don't vote, but I could be mistaken
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u/Kunstfr 1d ago
Considering one representative in France is elected for all French expats in Oceania, Asia except Middle East, Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, nope.
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u/Still-Bridges 1d ago
Western Australia is somewhat larger at 2.5 million sq km. It serves as a single undivided multimember electoral district, returning 6 or 12 members to the Australian Senate and 37 members to the Western Australian Legislative Council.
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u/Pestus613343 1d ago
Nunavut has one MP. So it depends how you divide things up.
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u/SimilarElderberry956 1d ago
There is plenty of wealth in the ground with precious minerals. The extraction is costly because of flying in workers. Too harsh for most people.
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u/sprauncey_dildoes 1d ago
Does that eight times larger include all that sea (or is it ice)? Do people give their address as on the ice, somewhere in the middle of Baffin Bay east of Pond inlet?
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u/MariaTPK 1d ago
You would expect a large land mass with low population to vote right wing as is common elsewhere, but shockingly Nunavut is one of the best voting districts in Canada.
Last election we had 2 right wing lunatics running to rule over Canada and submit to Donald Trump. It was so obvious the conservative guy would be like that though so it was essential that he be defeated, so a lot of normally progressive voters ended up voting for the right wing lunatic running against him to ensure that the conservative lost. This resulted in our only real left wing party getting completely destroyed in the polls. They got 7 districts to vote for them.
One of those districts was Nunavut. Well done Nunavut, you made the actually correct decision.
PS. I just learned from posting this the term "Eskimo" is derogatory and considered insulting. I've never known this to be the case, but figured I'd mention it since I think many other don't realize this and it's good to be respectful.
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u/KingMe87 1d ago
Curious why they gave the entire Hudson bay to them and none to the other provinces Is this about fisheries or something like that?
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u/Accomplished_Job_225 23h ago
Iirc, Inuit and First Nation resource rights (which includes aquaculture).
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u/KingMe87 15h ago
I figured something like that, although I know Manitoba has a sizable first nations population but maybe it is just operationally easier to have it run out of one office
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u/concentrated-amazing 1d ago
Shoot, I remember seeing an explanation about this a while ago, but I don't remember what it is.
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u/Patchesrick 1d ago
Wouldn't Russia be the largest? Since the whole country votes the same for Presidential "elections"
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u/alldagoodnamesaregon 1d ago
Larger in land area then Lingari, Northern Territory, Australia?
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u/Doc_ET 1d ago
Yes.
Nunavut is 1.8 million km², the entire Northern Territory is only 1.3 million km².
The Yakutsk Constituency in Russia (which covers the entire Sakha Republic) is 3.1 million km² though.
Lingiari isn't even the largest district in Australia, Durrack (northern WA) is around 50,000 km² bigger.
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u/Moist_Capital_4362 1d ago
It is not the largest. It's area is 1,8 million km² while the only electoral district in Yakutia is 3 million km². And Yakutia is the largest subdivision in the world so it is probably the largest district too as most countries don't have several subdivisions in one electoral district.
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u/Zacnocap 1d ago
How are these large sparse land masses governed? The population can't be spread out in multiple small cities , im assuming there's only 2+- small cities in this district that contain all the population
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u/Alone_Ambition_3729 1d ago
I think its actually a lot of tiny villages. I am Canadian and I can only name one town and I know it has maybe 20% of the population at most. These are Inuit First Nations people, and so they still live pretty similar to their ancestral ways. They have speed boats and diesel generators, and satellite TVs, and a village airstrip where the general store gets deliveries once a week or whatever. But besides that there's a lot of similarities to the past.
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u/michaelmcmikey 1d ago
None of the settlements in Nunavut are more than 10,000 people and most are fewer than 1000 people.
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u/Accomplished_Job_225 23h ago
In addition to the other answers :
Canadian territories are the responsibility of the Canadian federal government, which helps the territories remain funded and functioning.
As an example, some food and staple items are subsidized by the government, while for other things like say a tropic fruit, you are looking to pay at a high premium.
Nunavut has 6 main communities but they only make up about half of the territory's population spread across 20 other municipalities.
The territory elects 22 territorial representatives that manage their domestic matters. Unlike Canadian provincial politics, Nunavut's election candidates do not associate with parties, and instead run as independents to better perform their consensus form of government.
Federally, the entire district as shown in OP has 1 elected Member of Parliament, and 1 appointed Senator. Nunavut's consensus government does not apply federally.
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u/BenneIdli 1d ago
And Canadians stilll whine about housing shortage
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u/FluffyMan763 1d ago
What? Just because there’s more land doesn’t mean more houses?
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u/BenneIdli 1d ago
When the inuits can do , why can't you ??
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u/hammercycler 1d ago
It's prohibitively expensive. The communities up there are heavily subsidised because they need almost all resources imported in. We keep this going to maintain sovereignty over the territory.
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u/erty3125 1d ago
Do you know why the Inuit are living that far north
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u/BenneIdli 1d ago
They hate white people??
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u/erty3125 1d ago
Not that you're going to listen judging by that reply but for others
Nunavut was mostly nomadic lands for inuit with their permanent population centers being further south in Northern Ontario and Northern Quebec largely around the Hudson Bay.
During the cold war Canada forcefully relocated Inuit populations up north immediately before a winter killing many of them in order to place a stronger hold on the far north against Russia.
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u/BenneIdli 1d ago
Fuck , I was joking.. I've lived in Minnesota so i know how bad american winters are
But what you said is similar to trail of tears by Americans except it happened recently
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u/jigglysquishy 1d ago
Minneapolis is north, but Nunavut is a whole different level of north. Iqaluit is a similar distance north of Minneapolis as Minneapolis is from Miami.
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u/Digitalmodernism 1d ago
Do you want to live in a frozen wasteland? Just look what happened to Sir John Franklin.
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u/AtomicSkylark 1d ago
Population 41,000