CFB Wainwright principal base for live fire training
I’ve been covering the Canadian military for the past 20 years, and I can say it’s unprecedented to have the defence minister give a statement like this about a serious incident.
CFB Wainwright is the principal base for live fire training exercises. Military personnel describe it as essentially the ‘finishing school’ because it is the premier training base where all military elements—infantry, artillery, and air support—train together in combined arms training.
The base has 690 military personnel and 300 civilian workers. So we’re talking about a community of about 1,000 people on a regular day, with more during special training sessions.
It’s very important to the Canadian military because it’s been around since the Second World War. But it became the premier training base for Canadian troops that were heading to the Korean War in the 1950s. And it has continued to expand since then.
Many troops for Afghanistan would go to this base just prior to deployment overseas. But over the last few years, a lot of the Canadian combined arms training has been overseas as opposed to at Wainwright. But because of the influx of money coming into national defence and because there are more opportunities to train, there’s been a lot more activity at Wainwright in the last year or so.