Nunavut tourism projects get share of $1.3M from federal government
Iqaluit’s visitor centre, Travel Nunavut and Arctic Bay Adventures receive funding to ‘attract Canadians and visitors’
Renovations and repairs to Iqaluit’s Unikkaarvik Visitor’s Centre is one of four tourism-related projects in Nunavut that CanNor recently announced it will help fund. (Photo by Mosha Folger)
Nunavut tourism groups will get a boost of $1.3 million from the federal government for renovations and other initiatives.
The Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency announced the funding on June 29 in a news release. The money is meant to renovate tourism infrastructure, promote the North and establish new tourism destinations, the agency said in the release.
“By helping tourism operators expand capacity, we are supporting the people, businesses and experiences that make the territories must-see destinations,” Rebecca Chartrand, minister responsible for CanNor, said in the release.
The Government of Nunavut will get $825,000, doubling its budget for renovations and repairs to the Unikkaarvik Visitor Centre in Iqaluit and the Iqaluit Centennial Library.
Travel Nunavut is set to receive $200,000 from CanNor and $60,000 from the GN to produce short videos that tell the stories of tourism operators, CanNor said in the release.
The money that Arctic Bay Adventures, a tour guide company in Arctic Bay, receives will go to staff training, storage, new equipment and website design. These initiatives will get up to $249,033 from CanNor to supplement the $469,505 from the Government of Nunavut.
The company will also receive up to $29,722 to create a business plan to expand and create local jobs.
Nunavut will never have a thriving tourism industry until the Government does a better job subsidizing air and hotel travel for tourists. Nobody wants to pay $3000 to fly up to Cape Dorset and sit in an Inns North all day. Start by investing in the communities: make tourist destinations accessible, make tourist operators reliable and beautify the communities so that tourists actually want to take their cameras out. Cruise ship passengers and business travelers are not bona-fide tourists.
Build a tourist destination like upper canada village.
Old skills and traditions demonstrated by elders in a traditional setting…hire elders and locals of all ages to participate.
https://www.uppercanadavillage.com/
Or an ice hotel….also good for tourism and local hiring
Aurora Tourism is valued at $1.1Billion worldwide and growing rapidly. Some may say this type of tourism is actually exploding in popularity.
Like Yellowknife, the southern Kivalliq sits under the Auroral Oval and would have comparable viewing opportunities to Yellowknife, which is considered the best place in the world to view the Aurora.
Anywhere else in Nunavut, there are good to excellent opportunities to view Northern Lights.
Aurora Tourism in Yellowknife has matured to become a tourism product that incorporates other local activities such as cultural tours, dog teaming, using Dene tipis, and ice fishing.
I am surprised that Nunavut has not seemed to have tried at all to capture any of this tourism market. This is especially true considering how huge and affluent this market is when most come from Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan.
And, this tourism occurs during times of the year when local hotels are less full, and local outfitters may not be tied up with other types of clients.
Nunavut Tourism seems focused on catering to southern, predominantly white and European customers. This may be all well and good, but ignores a great deal of opportunity. Have Inuit become comfortable and predisposed to hosting these types of tourists?
Destination Nunavut, the web launch pad for our tourism industry, is not offered in any foreign language, including Mandarin Chinese.
If you randomly bring up Aurora Tourism in Nunavut, there is a good chance you will hear a joke about why predominantly Asian people want to see Northern Lights. In honesty, it is just as easy to make jokes about why Sports Hunters feel the need to bag the biggest animal.
Instead of making jokes about these tourists, perhaps now might be a good time to get serious and spare a thought on whether we can and should invite them to spend their money in our territory.
There’s literally at article on this website from last year called “Chinese tourism returning to Canada, but Nunavut not keen to capitalize”. The people managing tourism in Nunavut seem to have little to no interest in appealing to asian markets. As was mentioned by other commenters, there’s really not many unique tourist sites in Nunavut to attract tourists. A few national parks for the adventurous, but besides that and maybe hunting, why would anyone visit Nunavut when you can visit Yellowknife for significantly cheaper? Right at the airport they have ads for tour companies that you can contact via WeChat (the messaging app everyone uses in China) and there’s maps highlighting aurora viewing locations in the city, translated into several languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and more. Unless someone wants to experience a remote community, and is willing to spend more money to do so, I see little reason to recommend visiting Nunavut. Granted, a lot of foreign visitors might not be very familiar with the differences between NWT and NU. If they marketed what appeals to visitors (the northern lights, wildlife, dogsledding, etc.) and had basic resources available for visitors who aren’t fluent in English, they could probably get a fair amount of visitors, at least in Iqaluit (price is generally less of an issue for visitors coming from overseas too). It’s a shame, because Nunavut has a ton of potential to showcase the Arctic and local culture to others. But in its current state, there’s very few people I’d recommend visiting Nunavut to compared to Yellowknife.