Iqaluit Toonik Tyme civic holiday set for April 11
City offices, recreational facilities close for start of annual spring festival
Young racers take part in the 2023 Toonik Tyme kids snowmobile race. The 2025 kids race takes place on April 11. (File photo by David Venn)
City of Iqaluit recreational facilities will close April 11 for the Toonik Tyme civic holiday.
A municipal bylaw designates the first Friday of the annual spring festival as a holiday. It is intended to allow community members to take part in Toonik Tyme events, the city said in a news release.
Water, sewage and garbage services will run as scheduled. The dump will close and reopen April 12.
Some of the Toonik Tyme events planned for April 11 include sledding and ice golf near Arctic Winter Games arena, kid’s snowmobile racing on the sea ice, and the festival’s opening ceremony at the cadet hall.
The full schedule can be found on the Toonik Tyme website.
After all that time for a good civic coffee.
Why do they call it Toonik time? Where does that come from?
When Toonik Tyme started in 1965, the festival consisted of traditional Inuit games, throat singing and dancing, a community feast and an evening of dancing and music at Toonik Lake.
Bryan Pearson, the founder of Toonik Tyme, and other councilors from the Town of Frobisher Bay (which later became the City of Iqaluit) usually picked a person to preside over the festival and granted them with the Order of the Honourary Toonik. In the early years of Toonik Tyme, this honour was given to a distinguished guest invited to preside over the week’s festivities. The first Honourary Toonik was the Right Honourable John Diefenbaker, former Prime Minister of Canada. Other past Honourary Tooniks have included His Royal Highness, Charles the Prince of Wales; former Governor General Roland Michener; three former commissioners of the Northwest Territories: Bent Sivertz, Stuart Hodgson and John Parker; former Premier of Greenland, Lars Chemnitz and the former Mayor of Nuuk, Greenland, Peter Tharup Hoeg.
In more recent years, the Honourary Toonik award has gone to an individual in the community on a nomination basis. This award is still a special honour as the chosen individual is someone that is considered to be an outstanding volunteer and demonstrates exceptional community spirit.
The question was “Why do they call it Toonik time?”
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