OTTAWA — Scientists at the Canadian military’s premier research lab on chemical and biological weapons are demoralized and depressed, unable to get critical supplies and working in an old facility that needs to be shut for maintenance a quarter of the time, according to the latest report from the federal Biological and Chemical Defence Review Committee.

The panel of three scientists monitors Canada’s research on chemical and biological weapons to make sure the work is defensive rather than offensive, and that it’s “conducted in a professional manner with minimal risk to public safety or the environment.”

The findings about the lab, called Building 1, at Alberta’s Canadian Forces Base Suffield, are in the committee’s report covering 2022. It was released only last month after sitting with two defence ministers for more than a year.

“Time was taken to read the report and ensure the recommendations were fully understood,” Defence Minister Bill Blair’s spokesperson, Diana Ebadi, told The Logic. Blair took over from Anita Anand in a cabinet shuffle last July.

Building 1, now nearly 70 years old, has been due for replacement for decades and the latest plan is to commission its successor around 2032, according to a different DND spokesperson, Andrée-Anne Poulin.

That’s a couple of years sooner than the review committee anticipated in its report for 2022, and possibly in the nick of time: In 2020, looking at construction timeline of 12 to 15 years, the review committee said it expected Building 1’s containment systems would probably fail before the new facility was done.

Among other facilities, Building 1 includes a Level 3 containment lab for working with biological and chemical warfare agents, and a small facility that can synthesize them for research.

The scientists at Suffield study the effects of chemical and biological weapons and work on protections and antidotes for Canada’s troops and its allies. In 2021, though, the committee reported that the facility’s procurement office was overwhelmed, which was getting in the way of ordering goods that the researchers needed. 

The 2022 report added detail: there were three procurement posts for the research centre and two of them were vacant. That was “severely hampering scientific and training productivity and … as a consequence employee morale was also suffering due to frustration over their critical work being slowed or halted.”

The vacancies have recently been filled, according to DND.

The committee has long warned that attrition among the specialized scientists at the Suffield centre, with a lack of new staff to take over from those who retire or leave, is a “leading risk” to the Suffield operation’s mission.

“We were, therefore, surprised this year to learn that a centrally directed ‘freeze’ on hiring to fill vacant positions had been imposed on [Suffield] for reasons that were not well understood at the centre and as such was having a dispiriting effect on staff,” the report for 2022 said. The defence research outfit’s headquarters acknowledged the concern and told the committee that “action to address it was in hand.”

All of this put together—vacancies, lack of supplies, bureaucratic centralization, distractions, lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic—has the people at Suffield coping with “a generalized decline in employee morale or mental health.” Fixing the staffing and procurement problems would go a long way, the committee advised.

But the worst thing about Suffield in 2022 was the same as it was in 2021: its age and decrepitude, especially in the highest-security lab.

“Scheduled annual maintenance shutdowns, formerly a month in duration, are now three months or more long,” the committee’s report said. The trend is leading toward “serious impairment or even cessation of biological threat defence research at [Suffield] before the completion of the new laboratory.”