Canada to get new land border with Denmark as decades-long Hans Island dispute ends

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For the first time in further than 70 years, Canada is able to share a land border with a country other than the US.

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The border in question will probably be about one kilometer prolonged, and might bisect the Arctic island of Hans Island, a barren uninhabited rock midway between Nunavut and Greenland. One facet will probably be Canadian, and the alternative facet will probably be beneath the administration of the Kingdom of Denmark.

A senior authorities provide instructed the Nationwide Put up that Canada will probably be celebrating the model new border with a gift of Quebec whiskey to Denmark.

The island is a complete lot of kilometers from the closest human settlement and there could also be minimal proof of it ever having been utilized by Inuit. Nonetheless, it could mark the one place in North America whereby will in all probability be potential to cross into sovereign European territory with a single step.

The ultimate time Canada had a non-US land border was in 1949, when Newfoundland was nonetheless sovereign British territory. The earlier Dominion entered confederation that yr as Canada’s tenth province, efficiently erasing the worldwide boundary between Quebec and Labrador.

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Canada and Denmark have been feuding over the 1.3 sq. kilometers Hans Island for nearly 50 years.

Hans Island has been in Canada’s orbit since 1880, when Britain’s Arctic possessions had been formally transferred to Ottawa.

The Danes have claimed that their possession of the island dates all the easiest way once more to the Viking colonization of Greenland. Its determine comes from Hans Hendrik, a Greenland Inuk who served as a data for US and British Arctic expeditions all by the nineteenth century.

In accordance with Denmark, their declare to Hans Island was bolstered in 1933 when the now-defunct Eternal Courtroom of Worldwide Justice extinguished US claims to the jap Arctic and gave the Danes full sovereignty over Greenland. Since 1979, Greenland has been dominated as a semi-autonomous territory whose relationship to Copenhagen just isn’t all that dissimilar from Nunavut’s relationship to Ottawa.

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Whereas Canada and Denmark have been principally content material materials to keep up to their very personal sides of the slender channel separating Greenland and Nunavut, inside the Nineteen Seventies surveyors discovered that Hans Island was positioned straight astride the two worldwide areas’ maritime boundary.

What adopted was a decades-long current of passive aggressive navy energy. At any time when the Canadian or Danish militaries had been inside the house, they may make some extent of stopping at Hans Island, tearing down the rival nations’ flag and hoisting their very personal. After every flag movement, the Canadians would depart behind a bottle of whiskey whereas the Danes would depart behind a bottle of Scandinavian aquavit.

A minimal of 1 commentator has dubbed the dispute the “Friendliest Battle.”

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The extreme degree of the battle arguably bought right here in 2005, when then Minister of Safety Bill Graham made a helicopter journey to the island to witness the planting of the Canadian flag and the erection of an inukshuk.

The go to was dubbed an “occupation” by Denmark, which lodged and official diplomatic protest with the Authorities of Canada. The 2005 go to by Graham would in the long run compel Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen to declare that it was “time to stop the flag battle” and enter diplomatic negotiations with Canada. Rasmussen talked about the spat had no place in a “fashionable” world.

Ottawa was reportedly hoping to unveil the model new border on June 14 and it as a shining occasion of sovereign worldwide areas resolving their border disputes peacefully. As an alternative, any particular person leaked the data early to The Globe and Mail.

The island has no recognized strategic price or property, nevertheless Canada has remained notably stubborn of their claims to Hans Island partially to steer clear of being seen as a pushover on issues with Arctic sovereignty.

Whereas Denmark and Canada may need peacefully resolved the Hans Island issue, they proceed to be at loggerheads over a far more invaluable prize: The North Pole.

Canada stays embroidered in a years-long United Nations course of to divide up the Arctic. Up to now, Canada, Denmark and Russia have all submitted competing claims to a swath of Arctic Ocean that will include the North Pole.