Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Mar 18/02) - Tony Rose has been a fixture around the streets of Iqaluit for most of his life.

That's why it's important to him and his fiance that their wedding certificate bear a Nunavut stamp.

Tony Rose stands in front of the Nunavut legislative assembly building, where he works as the public affairs officer. - Kerry McCluskey/NNSL photo

But after the short ceremony is performed in June, the couple are rushing South to get remarried amid three days of sun, fun and whitewater rafting. News/North asks him why.

News/North: Are you nervous about your pending wedding?

Tony Rose: I think any time anyone goes into a wedding, they're going to be a little bit nervous, but I'm more excited by it than nervous.

NN: What aspect of it makes you nervous?

TR: This is a life-long decision we're making here. This is it, we're going out, we're going to get married. I'm going to spend the rest of my life with this woman. You have to be really, really positive before you make a step like that. In the end, I'm way more sure of myself than I am nervous of myself.

NN: How did you know this was the right decision?

TR: It just felt right. You just get to a point where if we're away from each other for a few hours, I start to feel sad and pine for her -- especially if she's in town and I travel, I get that urge to be calling every night. There has to be something right.

NN: How long have you been together?

TR: By the time we get married, it will be just under five years. We stayed engaged for about two-and-a-half years. We gave it a good, long time.

NN: Why such a long engagement?

TR: We wanted the wedding to be something that was special and interesting and kind of different so we spent a lot of time brainstorming and coming up with the concept of the wedding. Then we had to have enough time to implement that concept.

Because we're both from Nunavut, we're going to get married beforehand so we have a Nunavut marriage license. I don't know if it will be a church-style wedding or not.

It's definitely not going to be like that when we get down south. The actual ceremony is taking place outside of Ottawa because all of my extended family is from Saskatchewan, Tania's is from Nova Scotia and we have friends in Ottawa and Iqaluit. It's a central location. We're doing a three-day whitewater rafting thing with our friends. It's going to be a lot of fun.

NN: Are you actually getting married on a boat?

TR: No, we're getting married in an open air pavilion at the end of the three days of hanging out and splashing around the river and having a lot of fun.

NN: Why whitewater rafting?

TR: We got into it last summer. We did the Soper River with some friends from Ottawa and some friends from here and had a blast. It led to the inspiration for a whitewater wedding. Instead of bringing everyone to the Soper River, we decided to bring everyone to Ottawa where they have white water.

NN: Are you wearing the traditional kind of tuxedo and white dress thing?

TR: No, we're going to be going for pretty alternative style clothing -- something loose and very comfortable. It's going to be a non-formal, casual event.

NN: What's your honeymoon going to be like?

TR: We're taking six weeks in total. We'll have a week in Ottawa before the actual event. We get married on a Friday morning and that afternoon, we jump on a train to Toronto. Our actual wedding night is in Toronto and then the next morning we hop on a train and head to Vancouver.

We'll be in Vancouver for a few days, pop over to Victoria for a few days and then start hopping ferries until we make it up to Alaska. We'll be there for a few weeks and then we'll head back. It's going to be fun.

NN: Most people don't take that much time for their honeymoons any more. What makes the two of you want to go for six?

TR: This is a once in a lifetime thing. If there ever was a good excuse to travel and for your employer to give you some time off, a wedding is definitely a good one. We both have been saving up our leave for the year and we had this idea we wanted to have a nice, long break from work. I will have been in my job for about two years at that point so it will be nice to get out and forget about work.

NN: You said you and Tania are both from here?

TR: I've been in Iqaluit for 21 or 22 years. I was born on New Year's Eve in Regina, (Sask.) and I came here when I was two weeks old. My folks brought me to Qikiqtarjuaq (then Broughton Island). My folks had been living there for a number of years. We moved here in 1981 and I've been here since with the exception of university and travel. I think Tania has been here for 10 years or so, but she first came North when she was eight. She also lived in Cambridge Bay and Arviat and somewhere else in the Kivalliq.

NN: What sort of travelling have you done?

TR: I started travelling when I was 14. I went to the World Boy Scout Jamboree in Australia. It was awesome. I was 14 years-old and spent five weeks in Australia without my parents. I took a trip to Europe in high school and right after university some friends and I did a trip over to Europe. I worked the next summer at CBC in Iqaluit and in September of 1999, I did a six-month internship with the Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden.

NN: What was it like living in Stockholm?

TR: It was neat. The other cities in Europe, which have had wars waged in them three or four times in the past 100 years, you can tell things have been reconstructed and you can see damaged buildings. You walk around Stockholm and there's these 350-year-old buildings and they're pristine.

The entire city is built on top of bedrock so you have these islands of bedrock sticking up out of the ocean and they have all these crazy old buildings on them. That's where I had my office.

The entire city is connected by this excellent metro. You can travel all over the entire city. The metro actually goes underneath the ocean to get to these different islands so you're constantly going up and down. It was an awesome experience.

NN: What was your job there?

TR: I was a communications specialist. That's when I made my jump from journalism to communications.

NN: Why did you make that jump?

TR: I didn't have a go-for-the-throat attitude. That was the one thing I was always lacking in journalism school and what I'd get marked down on. I was too much into the soft and fuzzy stories and wasn't interested in taking people apart. You really have to be willing to do that once in a while as a journalist. I spent eight months working for CBC here and I learned I didn't have the gusto to be that person. When I went to Stockholm, I learned that communications for me was more interesting. When I got back to North America, I worked through the summer and this position as the public affairs officer at the legislative assembly came up. So far, it's been a good time.

NN: What is it you do?

TR: A lot of different things. No one at the legislative assembly is a specialist in anything. We all take on a broad variety of tasks. I'm in charge of doing tours at the legislative assembly. I do some of the writing and issue press releases for the assembly. I act as a liaison for the media. I'm the assembly's Web master. I'm the official photographer. I'm co-ordinating a landscaping project. The flags we put up last summer, I worked on that. I work on all of our interaction with the public. I have overall responsibility for the (audio-visual) systems. My realm is how the assembly interacts with the general public and the way the assembly looks and is presented.

NN: I remember you told me a funny story about when you first started to do tours at the assembly and what you used to tell people about the mace.

TR: There is a quartz crystal on the end of the mace. For the first weeks, I was telling people it was a diamond because I hadn't read my tour script closely enough. It's a big quartz crystal so when you told people it was a diamond, their eyes just popped open. It's a pretty impressive chunk of rock. I went back and read my script a little more closely. That was one of the little nuggets I hadn't committed closely enough to memory.