Canadian army plans to boost activity at Alberta’s massive CFB Suffield: commander

A sprawling military training base in southern Alberta can expect to see more activity this summer, says the commander of the Canadian Army.

Lt-General Michael Wright told an audience at a defence trade show Thursday that Canadian Forces Base Suffield, the country’s largest training area, will be used increasingly as a testing hub for new technology and for increased training.

“Suffield is a training base that we have not used very much over the past 10 or 11 years, but in an agreement between Canada and the United Kingdom, we’re going to be starting to use it increasingly this summer,” said Wright at the Defence Aerospace and Security Exhibition of Western Canada, or DEFSEC West.

“It’s fantastic to see, but we’ve also got some investments we need to make into CFB Suffield, like so many of our bases across the country.”

Wright didn’t specify what kind of investments would be made but said it would not be to the point where thousands of troops would be training there, as was seen in the past.

The history of the nearly 2,700-square-kilometre base — more than twice the size of New York City — dates back over half a century.

In the early 1970s, the British Army signed a deal with Canada to send thousands of troops to the base east of Calgary for armour training and exercises, until the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 brought everything to a halt.

When reports in 2021 suggested the British would pull out of Suffield entirely, the U.K.’s then-defence minister Ben Wallace hinted that armoured training would be “flexed” to other locations.

In 2023, the U.K. defence ministry announced it would start to wind down operations and training at Suffield. The U.K. government has since indicated it will spend £17 million (Cdn$31 million) on maintaining British Army Training Unit Suffield.

In January, the U.K.’s secretary of state for defence Al Carns said Suffield continues to be used for both training and experimentation activity. Two British training missions were planned at Suffield for 2025-26.

In an interview, Wright said there could be more.

“I won’t speak for the British Army, but they’re absolutely planning for increased use as well,” he said. 

One more was slated for 2027, the U.K. government says.

The base is also still used by Canadian reserve units for training, with some of those soldiers joining the NATO mission in Latvia. Each year, the Defence Research Development Canada branch hosts allied biological and chemical agent training.

Wright said the base needs to be used after a long period of inactivity.

“As the Canadian army builds and the Canadian Armed Forces builds, we’re going to need that ability to do larger-scale training across the country,” he said.

— With files from Kyle Duggan in Ottawa