Seven Canadians are dead on a training range in east-central Alberta, and nobody was invading anything.
A live-fire exercise at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright set off an explosion and a fire on Saturday. Global News reported seven dead and dozens injured, citing Forces sources. Defence Minister David McGuinty confirmed deaths and injuries and would not give a number, calling the situation "very active and delicate." He also said, "I cannot recall an incident like this in recent memory." He's right. An event with no precedent ends up treated as an accident with no cause — that is how this gets handled.
Multiple Forces sources told Global News the exercise struck a gas line or a gas well. Edmonton declared a code orange, the term a hospital uses when it has to change how it works for the day. The wind was gusting to 100 kilometres an hour, and the fire ran off the range, through the fence and into our town.
Those are the facts, and they're bad enough. Here's the part that won't be said in Ottawa this week. We did this in peacetime, to ourselves, on our own ground, in a training cycle built to keep pace with an alliance.
Canada is spending its way back toward a NATO benchmark it ignored for three decades. That spending does not arrive as a cheque. It arrives as tempo — more exercises, more rotations, more live-fire days on ranges like ours, more young people doing dangerous things on a schedule set somewhere else. The equipment is late. The ranges are old. The pace is not.
Ask where the other job went. In the early 1990s Canada had roughly 3,300 personnel on United Nations peacekeeping operations and was among the largest contributors in the world. Today it's fewer than thirty — Canada now ranks somewhere in the sixties among contributing countries — on figures tracked by Walter Dorn of the Royal Military College, whose count of the decline is the one most often cited. The UN's totals and Ottawa's differ, as they always have, but every version tells the same story. That was the work this country was known for, and it didn't put our people on a live-fire range in a gas field.
Nothing is coming across the prairie. There's no invasion of Alberta to prepare for — no force massing on the forty-ninth parallel, no scenario where a brigade at Wainwright is what stops it. These exercises are a contribution to somebody else's posture, and the bill is being read out of an Edmonton emergency department.
Premier Danielle Smith called it "significant and tragic." It's both — and it was also avoidable, which is the word her statement leaves out.
The strongest case against us deserves saying out loud. Soldiers who train only dry get people killed when it stops being training. Wainwright exists because the army needs ground big enough to manoeuvre a brigade and shoot while it does. And a country that can't defend itself — this is the part that's hard to answer — ends up defended by somebody else, on their terms. All of that is true. None of it explains firing live across a gas field in a wind warning, and none of it is an argument for the pace.
Our position is plain. The training tempo Canada has adopted to satisfy an alliance commitment is not worth Canadian lives, and Saturday is the proof rather than the argument. Stand the exercises down — all of them, not the one at Wainwright. Find out what is under every range in this country before anyone fires on it again. Then have the argument about what the Forces are for, in public, with the province that hosts the ranges in the room.
Seven families here are being told something tonight that no alliance target makes up for.
