St. Jude’s Cathedral in Iqaluit has paid a tax bill, which had previously threatened the cathedral’s financial stability, with the help of several parishes from across the diocese of the Arctic and elsewhere in Canada, diocesan Bishop Alexander Pryor says.
The city of Iqaluit has also set the tax rate for places of worship to zero for 2026, reversing course on a bylaw which came into effect there in 2023 requiring places of worship to pay property taxes. The parish’s other buildings used for nonprofit purposes—such as their soup kitchen and an Inuit wellness organization—have also been granted exemptions, Pryor says. The cathedral will still, as always, have to pay property tax on clergy residences, he says.
The Anglican Journal reported in November the cathedral was struggling under back taxes owed on the church after former Iqaluit mayor Kenny Hill introduced the unusual bylaw taxing places of worship.
In 2021, when Hill first announced the bylaw, he told CBC it was a response to the announcement ground-penetrating radar had found potential burial sites near the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, which was run by the Roman Catholic church. “The Catholic Church needs to apologize. And I think this is the only way we can make them,” he was quoted as saying.
A spokesperson for Iqaluit’s municipal government declined to comment on the reinstated tax exemption for places of worship in the city.
When the city reset the tax rate for places of worship to zero, CBC also quoted city councillor Kyle Shepherd saying he thought charging them the full tax rate for institutions had been an oversight at the time. He did not respond to an Anglican Journal request for comment on whether the cathedral would be elligible for any refund to correct that oversight.
Pryor previously told the Journal the diocese was seeking relief from the territorial legislature, which has the authority to cancel outstanding tax debts that for the cathedral then amounted to $63,000.
Instead, the parish has paid its back taxes with the help of the Nunavut parishes of St. Timothy’s, Pond Inlet; St. Francis, Arviat; and St. Luke’s, Pangnirtung; the Quebec parish of St. Matthew’s, Puvirnituq; and the Ontario parishes of St. Margaret’s, Ottawa and St. Matthew – St. Aidan, Buckhorn, as well as the Iqaluit Pentecostal Church and the Iqaluit Women’s Auxiliary. Pryor’s understanding is that the worship space now has a permanent tax exemption in place, while the other nonprofit spaces must reapply once every three years, he says.
Paying off the tax bill solves one of the several problems facing the cathedral, Pryor adds, but there are others remaining.
“The burning question [is], will this save the cathedral? This is one part of the cathedral’s conundrum.”
St. Jude’s is also struggling with the rising costs of insurance and utilities, he says, as well as with an ongoing decrease in congregational attendance. But the cathedral and diocese have plans underway to address these, too.
The parish is in the process of negotiating a switch to insuring the cathedral for the cost to replace it with a new building to serve the same function in case it was destroyed, Pryor says—but not necessarily to rebuild the unique structure as it is now.
Likewise, he adds, the church has sought input from all the contractors in Iqaluit with experience in heating large spaces, looking for one who can help calculate the most efficient way to heat the cathedral’s space. Once they find one, they will replace the heating system, which Pryor says will go a long way toward reducing the utility bill.
Meanwhile, the cathedral’s English-speaking congregation tends to be made up of people who come to work in Nunavut on a temporary basis and thus cycle in and out regularly. The vestry and wardens at the cathedral have a plan to increase outreach to that transient population, he says.
They also have a plan to increase the parish’s followup with those in the Inuit congregation who often come for baptisms and weddings but do not maintain regular contact with the parish. It won’t turn the church’s attendance around overnight, Pryor says, but he believes these efforts to more actively reach out to the people of Iqaluit have the potential to begin a slow change for the better.
“I’m quite hopeful that working forward on all four of these parts of the equation, we will be able to save the cathedral.”
