Something I noticed last night while looking in to the schedule for when my goods get to Iqaluit: this year, my shipper, Desgagnés Transarctik, is not picking up goods in Churchill to deliver to communities in central and western Nunavut. Instead, it has a ship leaving Montreal that's going down the St Lawrence and around Labrador and Quebec, to get to those communities -- and to Churchill itself.
That's because one of those 500-year events that's become so common lately knocked out the rail line to Churchill this spring. With that, Churchill flipped from being the port to supply Hudson Bay and the western Arctic, to being a fly-in community.
That's similar to what's happened in the NWT and the northern reaches of Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan: they're supplied by a seasonal road only open in winter -- the roads follow frozen lakes and rivers. That season is getting shorter. Increasingly often they're stuck flying in all their supplies -- even the diesel for heat and electricity.