OTTAWA — For more than 20 years before a fire at CFB Wainwright killed four soldiers and seriously hurt dozens more on Oct. 17, the Canadian Armed Forces had been warned that it wasn’t taking its members’ safety seriously enough.

“A fundamental transformation is required to close long-standing gaps, support organizational change and mitigate safety risks to personnel, equipment, the environment, reputation and mission readiness,” said documents presented to Gen. Jennie Carignan, the chief of the defence staff, at the end of 2025. 

Internal research and reports, dating to 2003, had spelled out problems in structures, systems and culture that the military had not been able to address, the material said. The most senior generals and admirals below Carignan agreed: the Forces needed clear direction from the very top.

The situation was particularly urgent because of how quickly the Canadian military would be adding people and new equipment, the documents said.

“While this growth enhances capability, it also introduces greater complexity and safety risks that can undermine operational readiness and mission success,” the documents said.

The material, which The Logic obtained through an access-to-information request, was part of a roadmap to fixing the problems. Carignan approved the plan.

Reaching “initial operational capability” was expected to take more than a year, until spring 2027, with work on the new “Defence Safety Programme” to be led by Carignan’s vice-chief—Lt.-Gen. Stephen Kelsey at the time, now Vice-Adm. Angus Topshee. Full operating capability would take another year.

The Department of National Defence could not say by deadline whether the military is on track to meet that schedule, or whether the failings described in the documents might have contributed to the deaths on the Alberta military base.

The diagnosis laid out for Carignan was harsh.

“Extensive analyses and audits from 2003 to 2023 identified weaknesses in structure, policies, processes, culture and mindsets,” the documents said. “These gaps may contribute to elevated risk exposure and heighten our vulnerability to operational and organizational challenges.”

The officers preparing the material sorted the problems into four categories: organizational (it was unclear who was really responsible for safety, with at least 27 identifiable safety regimes that often overlapped), informational (important information was in silos across the Forces), resources (never enough money or people) and oversight (“weak compliance, assurance and prevention mechanisms”).

All of this exposes the Defence Department to “legal and reputational liability, and erodes morale and retention,” the documents said. “Most critically, it constrains commanders’ ability to make timely, risk-informed decisions essential to the safety and resilience of the force.”

Scott Clancy, a retired Royal Canadian Air Force major-general, read the documents at The Logic’s request. The material is praiseworthy for its honesty about a very long-standing problem, he said.

A former helicopter pilot who commanded the air component of Canada’s aid mission in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, Clancy said the military has long struggled with the tension between keeping people safe and carrying out dangerous missions.

The military isn’t like any other workplace, Clancy noted: Nowhere else can bosses knowingly order subordinates to put their lives on the line. There’s no union to grieve poor working conditions and going public with workplace problems is forbidden.

But the need to accept that extreme danger is sometimes part of the job can become an excuse for accepting risk even when there’s no good reason to, Clancy said.

Speaking as a former pilot who flew helicopters transporting soldiers, he said the air force was always strict about rules on pilots’ rest and sleep hours, for instance, because “you can’t run someone for 24 hours and expect them to just fly.”

But it led to friction between branches. “We used to get ridiculed by the army about those regulations that the rest of us would just consider to be prudently safe,” he said.

Over the past 10 or 15 years, the other branches have picked up some of the air force’s safety culture, he said. But the Forces still have problems with safety that can only be attacked from the very top, Clancy said—such as a habit of setting policies at headquarters that conflict with each other, or with getting a task done, and leaving it to more junior officers in the field to figure out what to do.

Those officers will know that their next assignments and promotions, which are always just around the corner, depend more on the results they deliver than on showing they followed policy. “There’s a cultural thing in there that they have to keep moving and they have to achieve the mission—always be achieving the mission,” Clancy said.

Clancy was adamant that the catastrophe at CFB Wainwright needs a thorough investigation before anyone concludes anything about fault, but he suspects systemic factors will be found to have been important.

A fire on a training range for grenade launchers there grew into the lethal inferno on Oct. 17, but it’s not clear yet how closely it was being monitored, or who decided what about how to handle it. 

“Fire people aren’t allowed to get onto that range to fight those fires because of unexploded ordnance,” Clancy said. As a pilot, he would often fly a helicopter out to drop water on a fire from above. That’s less risky than walking onto a firing range with a hose, but not risk-free. Sometimes, safety considerations were exactly why a fire on a base would just be left to burn out.

Regardless of the specifics of this disaster, he said, if the Forces don’t finally crack their safety problems, the dangers to members of a fast-growing military will be “unquantifiable in the extreme.”

Clancy believes that having 27 different safety regimes isn’t a problem in itself, in a complex environment with many hazards. But the military needs to understand how risks fit together, how to mitigate them and how to decide when a task is not worth the potential cost, he said.

“Where you have no standards, where you can’t put those things together,” Clancy said, “that’s where [risk] is incalculable.”