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

The commander of the Canadian Army says there will be more activity at CFB Suffield this summer as Canadian and UK forces take part in training and testing of new technology.

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 base, which is located in the southeast corner of Alberta, just north of Medicine Hat, is nearly 2,700-square-kilometres in size — more than three times the size of the city of Calgary — and its use dates back more than 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.