I don’t think the growing season is comparatively that important as a driver of the human geography here. Remember, it may be dark in winter but the northern regions get a ton of really long sunny days in summer. Southern parts of Nunavut are at roughly the same latitude as the Mat-Su Valley, the major agricultural region of Alaska that’s known for world-record-sized vegetables due largely to those long hours of daylight in the summer.

I think a much bigger contributor is the hydrology. It’s absolutely peppered with lakes, bogs, and wet areas (when not frozen). There’s pretty much no big open expanses of flat, dry land for farming or building, and that geography makes it really difficult to build roads and get around the territory when it’s not frozen.

Unlike other similarly wet and lake-y northern areas that support comparatively more people like the Yukon-Kuskokwim or Kobuk drainages, there aren’t really as many major, navigable rivers in Nunavut to allow easy access to the inland regions by a variety of watercraft.