10/06/2026
For those who don't remember the good old days
Canadian Forces Base Suffield's history as a military installation reflects the full arc of Canadian defence policy from the Second World War through the Cold War and into the present, and the British Army's continuous presence there since 1972 makes it one of the most durable bilateral military arrangements in Canadian history, an expression in practical terms of the Canada-UK defence relationship that has existed since Confederation. The base was established in 1941 on land in the Special Areas of southeastern Alberta, a region of short-grass prairie that had been devastated by the drought and agricultural failure of the 1930s and where significant areas of land had reverted to Crown ownership or been placed under government management. The combination of vast flat terrain suitable for large-scale exercises, isolation from populated centres that made testing of hazardous materials feasible, and the existing road and rail connections through Medicine Hat made the location ideal for the Canadian-British chemical warfare research program that was one of the primary purposes of the original installation. Suffield Experimental Station, as the base was initially known, hosted Allied chemists who developed and tested mustard gas, phosgene, lewisite, and other chemical agents under controlled conditions on the prairie, producing research that informed protective equipment design and casualty treatment protocols. The scale and nature of this research was classified for decades and became publicly known in stages through the 1980s and 1990s as government records were declassified. The research function was continued after the war by the Defence Research Board, which was reorganized several times before becoming the current Defence Research and Development Canada facility at Suffield, which continues to conduct defence science research on the base. The training function of the base developed alongside the research mission.
