For years I have been trying to arrange a swap: PEI for Idaho. Both have a potato economy, and PEI is already pretty much bought up by Americans, but most importantly for me is that Idaho has wonderful wildwater paddling.
I had never even heard of Nunavut, much less ever Googled it. This is all news to me, and very interesting. Thanks, Jinx, for asking this question.
Here’s the original Vote for Bob campaign.
Alas, Bob could only manage second place to NWT when they ran the poll.
From here
The enthusiasm for ‘Bob’ is, I think, much akin to the enthusiasm for renaming another public entity ‘Doris’. 
All “lines on a map” (excepting geographic markers such as coastlines and rivers) on political maps denote political boundaries, so yes, the Districts all had separate government authorities and services. In practice, however, over the years the government of the NWT became more and more centralized in the territorial capital of Yellowknife, and so the Districts became less and less important politically. I believe they were abolished long before the 1999 partition.
You can read more about the Districts on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Districts_of_Northwest_Territories
It’s set in the fictional city of River City, Iowa (modeled after Meredith Willson’s home town, IIRC), where they had trouble, with a capital T, that rhymes with P…
Prof. Harold Hill, as a part of his scam, claimed to be from Gary, Indiana, in a song by that name.
friedo from Brooklyn probably has no idea what a local NYC phenomenon this is. Nowhere else in the country have I told people I came from Iowa and been greeted with a comment about Idaho or Ohio. Right across the socio-, economic, and educational spectrum. Although I suspect it may be a kind of cultural identifier, as the people who do it generally have stronger regional speech patterns than those who don’t.
Do you also conflate Minnesota, Montana, and I dunno, Manitoba?
Don’t forget Mississippi and Missouri.
snigger
But, did Stock get t-shirts?
Hey! I voted for that. As a matter of fact, so did my dog. Really. He logged onto the This Hour Has 22 Minutes website, and expressed his strong feelings on the subject.
Seriously, I thought they were going to call it either Western Arctic or Denendeh.
“The Remaining Part Of The North-West Territories” dioesn’t seem to cut it.
We went around calling it “The rest of it” for awhile.
Dude, I grew up in Ohio and I don’t know the difference between Iowa and Idaho.
–Cliffy
And despite that shinkage, NWT is still larger than any US state except Alaska (and isn’t much smaller than AK). Of course, it started off with something like 40% of the continent…
Well, it’s cold up there.
Another factoid: Nunavut, with a single seat in the House of Commons, is the second-largest electoral district in the world. Only Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, is larger.
No, you’re not paying for this service. You’re paying for access to the website. But the service you have no compunctions about requesting (even when it would be easier for you to do it yourself) is the free research the rest of us do to answer your questions. None of us get paid for that.
There’s not much in it though. Kalgoorlie (2,295,354 km[sup]2[/sup]) is just under 10% bigger than Nunavut (2,093,190 km[sup]2[/sup]).
They eat blubber. Of course they need a big seat.
That was funny when I thought of it.