IQALUIT -- Over a 50-year reign, the Queen has done everything from opening dog shows to launching ships. Today, in Canada's raw, dusty, northernmost capital city, she'll perform a first: celebrate a new street sign.

No fancy unveiling. No golden cord handed to Her Majesty to pull away a silk covering. This is the pragmatic, informal, slightly chaotic North.

Just before she goes on a walkabout outside the Nunavut territorial legislature building, workers will have hauled a blue plastic tarpaulin off a nearby wooden post with crosspieces proclaiming the Queen to be standing at the corner of Queen Elizabeth II Way and Miwik Avenue.

"I don't believe she's done that before," her press secretary, Penny Russell-Smith, said yesterday.

But then it is likely the Queen has not been to a place with no street signs. The one unveiled today will be Iqaluit's first -- southern urban ways come to the Arctic.

The only similarity between Iqaluit's Queen Elizabeth Way and the now-six-lane Queen Elizabeth Way that runs between Toronto and Niagara Falls, which was opened by the Queen's mother in 1939, is that both are paved -- the Iqaluit one a few weeks ago, and only partly.

Until now, presumably, everyone in this town of 6,000 has simply known where they were.

The Queen and Prince Philip arrive in Iqaluit at one minute after noon to begin a 12-day Golden Jubilee tour of Canada that will take them from the far north to British Columbia, across the country to the Maritimes and finally to Ottawa.

The royal couple will be welcomed at the airport by Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson and her husband John Ralston Saul and then driven in an ordinary RCMP car five minutes to the legislature along Miwik Avenue -- which in Inuktitut means, logically, "landing." It's the road from the airport.

For the two hours and 25 minutes the couple are in Iqaluit, the Queen will dedicate the legislature building -- the only one in Canada leased from a private owner.

After a walk outside the legislature, they will be driven another five minutes to Inuksuk High School where Prince Philip will hand out his Duke of Edinburgh Awards to students while the Queen meets with Inuit elders. The Queen and Philip together will watch a demonstration of Inuit sports and activities in the school gymnasium.

Then there's another five-minute drive to a sculpture garden, followed by a five-minute drive back to the airport for a flight to Victoria.

Greeting the Queen at the legislature will be Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his wife Aline, Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, Premier Paul Okalik, territorial commissioner Peter Irniq and about 200 journalists.

The CBC has flown in Peter Mansbridge. The Toronto Star and National Post have sent their best-known columnists.

There will be no firing of a royal salute by ceremonial military artillery, no troops presenting fixed bayonets. That would not fit with Northern culture, said Kevin MacLeod, head of Canada's office for state ceremonial and protocol.