Arctic policy of Albion

The Arctic policy of Albion encompasses both Albion's foreign and domestic policy towards its Arctic territories and the broader arctic region.

Albion has the largest Arctic territory of any country and the second-highest population, behind the Soviet Union. The province of Yukon, the Mackenzie and Northern Territory and the Autonomous Nation of Nunavut lie within the Arctic. Albion is a member of the Arctic Council alongside the USSR, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland.

Along with its mainland territory, Albion claims sovereignty over the related continental shelf and the Arctic archipelago. It considers the waters between the islands, including the Northwest Passage, to be Alban Internal Waters and fully under Alban jurisdiction under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Most maritime nations, including the United States and USSR, consider them an international strait.

Population
Albion has the largest Arctic territory in the world and the second-highest population. As of 2020, slightly more than 1 million people live in the three jurisdictions within the Arctic, with just over 800,000 of them being concentrated in the Province of Yukon.

The ethnic groups broadly described as the Northern Nations make up approximately 20% of this population, of which the largest group are the Inuit, alongside groups such as the Yupik and Aleut peoples. The establishment of Nunavut provided for the first modern jurisdiction in which Inuit is the official language.

History
Alban sovereignty over the landmasses of the Arctic Archipelago is not disputed. While several of the islands were first visited and claimed for Norway between 1898 and 1902, the country relinquished these claims in 1930 and acknowledged Alban and British sovereignty over the High Arctic.

Historically, occupation of the land has been considered vital to asserting sovereignty. The Alban government has attempted numerous initiatives to drive occupation of the region.

The Alban Forces maintain military installations in the High Arctic to physically assert sovereignty over the region. One of these, AFS Alert, is the northernmost inhabited point on Earth.

Northern Relocations
In 1953, the government of Laurence Geddes relocated 97 Inuit from northern Yukon to two settlements in the far north, one at Qausuittuq an the other at Grise Fiord. The government claimed these relocations were voluntary and designed to alleviate food shortfalls and save lives. Those who were relocated dispute this claim and assert they were kidnapped and moved to near-uninhabitable settings in the north to act as "human flagpoles" for the sake of Alban sovereignty. The government of Isaiah Hunter, Albion's first Indigenous Prime Minister, would formally apologize for the relocations in 1993 and pay an undisclosed sum in reparations to the victims and their descendants.

1985 USCGC Polar Sea Incident
In 1985, the United States Coast Guard ship USCGC Polar Sea conducted a transit of the Northwest Passage from Greenland through Alaska en route to the US West Coast. The transit, part of a routine resupply operation, was conducted without formal authorization from the Alban government, in large part due to significant time and cost savings the USCG believed it could achieve by avoiding the Tehuantepec Dry Canal or the Nicaragua Canal. Permission for the transit was not sought due to the American government's position that the Northwest Passage is an international strait.

The transit created a challenge for the government of Prime Minister Mark Longfield. Informally notified of the impending transit, the government elected to cooperate with the American government. However, as plans became public, popular opinion in Albion rallied strongly against the proposed transit, placing pressure on the Longfield government to take preventative measures. The voyage further coincided with an election anticipated the following year.

The government attempted to thread the needle on the controversy by issuing vaguely-worded protests and sending a pair of AF-14 Tomcats to conduct an unarmed overflight of the Polar Sea during the transit. However, Longfield's response was widely viewed as weak, and the loudest voices opposed to the transit came from private individuals. At one point in the transit, the Polar Sea was tailed for 35 hours by five motorboats full of Inuit activists, shouting at the American crew via bullhorns to "go home." At another point, a bushplane flown by Inuit activists and students succeeded in dropping leaflets onto the deck of the icebreaker, requesting the crew return to international waters.

The ensuing controversy was part of the factors that diminished Longfield to a minority government in the 1986 election. It led directly to the fielding of new heavy icebreakers and the expansion of naval and air patrols in the north, and it was a major factor in the Alban nuclear submarine program that would define Longfield's later term.

In 1988, the United States and Albion would agree to a bilateral deal in which the US would agree to ask permission for passage through the north, while specifying that it maintained its position on the internationality of the Northwest Passage.

2000 Shrimp War

 * Main article: Shrimp War

In 2000, a fisheries dispute between the Alban autonomous territory of Nunavut and the Danish autonomous region of Greenland escalated into a bloodless standoff following an incident in which a Royal Air Force of Albion aircraft was fired on by Danish trawlers in Baffin Bay. The dispute over fishing rights saw military ships and aircraft deployed to the boundary zone between Nunavut and Greenland before being resolved by the Baffin-Greenland Treaty of 2001, broadly reflecting Albion's position in the boundary disagreement.

2002 Arctic Presence Act
In 2002, the government of Eugene Woloshyn announced plans to establish full Alban Forces bases in the High Arctic. The settlement of Qausuittuq was identified as the site of an RAFA station, AFB Resolute. A naval post, AFB Nanisivik, was announced at the site of a closed-down northern mining concern. These installations would be fully completed by the government of Anthony Handler following a period of delay, with both bases opening in 2012.