Parish struggling to pay tax, insurance costs for iconic church
Parishioners at St. Jude’s Cathedral in Iqaluit are in danger of losing their place of worship if the congregation and the diocese of the Arctic cannot find solutions to several pressing financial problems, says Bishop Alexander Pryor. An outstanding tax bill with the City of Iqaluit, rising insurance rates, high operational costs and the by-now familiar problem of congregational decline—each exacerbated by the unique challenges of life in Northern Canada—have combined to threaten the parish’s ownership of the cathedral.
“I think we are at the point right now where if something doesn’t change with the finances, we could end up losing the building,” he says.
St. Jude’s is the cathedral church of the diocese of the Arctic. The original building, designed by architect Ron Thom in the 1970s to resemble an igloo and built by volunteers, was severely damaged by arson in 2005. The parish demolished what was left and rebuilt the structure to match its original appearance with the help of fundraising by parishioners and donations from across Canada, the United States and Europe. It took until 2012 to finish rebuilding the cathedral and until 2018 to finish paying off the costs of the construction.
The City of Iqaluit has now warned the parish St. Jude’s could end up on a list of properties for auction over an overdue property tax bill, Pryor says. The bill was accrued under a city bylaw which came into effect in 2023 requiring religious institutions to pay tax on land used for places of worship. Former Iqaluit mayor Kenny Bell originally announced the bylaw in 2021, in response to an announcement that ground-penetrating radar had shown potential unmarked burial sites near a Saskatchewan residential school. “The Catholic church needs to apologize. And I think this is the only way we can make them,” Bell was quoted as saying in a CBC News piece at the time.
The Anglican Journal contacted David Amborski, founding director of the Centre for Urban Research and Land Development at Toronto Metropolitan University, who said he was not aware of any precedent in Canada for Iqaluit’s removal of the tax exemption for places of worship.
The parish applied for and eventually received a 75 per cent exemption from the tax. But the diocese still owes $63,620 on behalf of the congregation across the short time the bylaw was in effect, says Pryor, which it simply cannot afford to pay. That number includes about $29,000 owed on the cathedral property for the year 2023 and $14,600 for 2024 as well as the taxes the parish was already paying on the land for its soup kitchen and ministry centre, says Pryor. He adds that the diocese and parish have since successfully lobbied the city, making the case that the value added by religious spaces far outweighs the tax revenue from their properties. In response, the city added a method by which churches could apply every year for a full exemption to the tax.
But the exemption does not apply retroactively, Pryor says, and the city does not have the authority to cancel a past tax debt, leaving St. Jude’s’ bill outstanding. The authority to cancel the tax debt rests with Nunavut’s territorial legislature. This remedy is accessible only through a lengthy and complicated process, he says. The legislature has just finished the territorial election cycle, which had legislators on the campaign trail until late October. Pryor said he hoped the new government would be willing to consider cancelling the debt.
Reached by the Journal, a spokesman for the City of Iqaluit declined an interview, but provided the statement, “The City of Iqaluit applies its property taxation policies in accordance with territorial legislation and local by-laws, including the Property Tax Exemption By-law (No. 1001). We continue to work with all property owners to support compliance and ensure fair and transparent administration of the process.” Several other religious organizations appear on Iqaluit’s property tax arrears list.
The largest cost facing the cathedral is an annual $188,000 insurance bill, which covers what it would cost to rebuild the cathedral, with its unique design in the shape of an igloo. Aside from the normally higher prices in Northern Canada, where everything from building materials to milk comes with additional shipping, fuel and logistics costs, insurance rates on churches in the North have risen dramatically, says Pryor. A series of church burnings has raised the risks of insuring religious buildings. In 2024, CBC reported that 33 churches had burned down in Canada, 24 of them due to arson, since the 2021 announcement of potential residential school grave sites.
The parish plans to convert its insurance policy to cover a functional replacement instead of a full rebuild. That would mean building a more basic worship space in the place of the current building in case it is destroyed or seriously damaged, says Pryor. The goal, he says, is to ensure the congregation has a building to worship in and an insurance bill it can afford to pay.
Meanwhile, the church is facing all the regular costs that come with operating in the North, including heating and electricity bills which totalled $145,000 and $13,000 respectively in 2024, says Pryor. The church is often used for two or three funerals per week on short notice when bodies are flown back from medical treatment or examination in Ottawa. Because it takes the building a long time to heat up, staff have a choice between keeping the building at an operational temperature all week long or having mourners shivering in the Arctic cold.
St. Jude’s is also experiencing an ongoing decline in congregation size, especially at its English-language services as retiring parishioners move south. All of these factors have resulted in the parish regularly running deficits in its budget, and the parish now owes roughly $160,000 to the diocese, says Pryor.
The diocese and the cathedral are entering a period of discernment looking for solutions both to expand the church’s membership and to lower its costs, he says. Those include evangelism and outreach efforts, says Pryor, but also possible staffing changes at the cathedral, which until recently had a full-time dean, an associate priest, a part-time ministry worker and a full-time parish administrator. Former dean the Rev. Chris Dow has moved away to become chaplain at Wycliffe College in Toronto and former part-time priest Bishop Ann Martha Keenainak has become a suffragan bishop, but even without their salaries to pay, the cathedral is still struggling, Pryor says.
