The Board Does Not Find Fault

The army knew there was a grass fire on the range at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright for several hours on Saturday 17 October. It judged the fire far enough away and under enough control for live training to go on. Then the wind turned, and four soldiers died.

The dead are Sergeant Morgan Wong of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment, serving with the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, and Privates Shaun Farrell, Aidan Goulding and Hayden Lykkemark of the same battalion, Major-General Wade Rutland, commander of 1st Canadian Division, said on Sunday, as CP24 reported. Thirty-nine people were taken to hospital. Nineteen were in critical condition on Sunday, eight stable and twelve were being treated without admission, according to Acute Care Alberta. The troops were training for deployment to Latvia.

What the army has said happened

About 84 soldiers of the battalion’s Charlie Company were split between a hand-grenade range and an area where sections practised attacks on a simulated enemy, Al Jazeera reported. At about 4pm the fire, which General Rutland said had been about a kilometre away, swung toward the range and overran its administrative area. He said a fire should not cover a kilometre that fast; CP24 quotes him as saying “30 to 60 seconds,” and Al Jazeera as saying 36. The base had been watching the fire for hours, he said, and training had been allowed to continue.

Two documents frame the decision. An internal military communication issued on Saturday night told Forces officials that the “fire index” for the base “was low,” The Globe and Mail reported. Environment Canada’s forecasts at 5am and 11am that day had called for afternoon gusts of up to 80 km/h, and by the afternoon a yellow alert covering Wainwright warned of gusts up to 100 km/h, the Globe said. The Department of National Defence said there were no indications of terrorist activity.

Four investigations, one of them public by default

General Rutland named the processes now running, according to a second Globe report. A fire marshal team is to determine the cause. The Canadian Forces National Investigation Service, the military police’s independent investigative unit, and the RCMP are investigating alongside local military police. And the Canadian Armed Forces will convene a board of inquiry. “With this amount of casualties and complexities, it’s not going to take a day or a week,” he said.

The board is the instrument most likely to produce the full account, and it is built for a narrower purpose than its name suggests. Section 45 of the National Defence Act lets the Minister, or authorities the Minister appoints, convene one where it is “expedient that the Minister or any such other authority should be informed” on a matter connected with the Forces, “for the purpose of investigating and reporting on that matter.” Its powers are real: it can summon any person, compel evidence on oath, and receive evidence “whether or not the evidence or information is or would be admissible in a court of law.”

What it does not do is find fault. A board, usually of three members, is purely investigative and designed to make recommendations to prevent a recurrence, a military lawyer told the Globe. Its hearings and its report are not automatically made public. Michel Drapeau, a retired colonel who teaches law at the University of Ottawa and has represented families before such boards, told the paper he had seen families wait five or six years for reports that were often abridged or redacted, and said public access here was “absolutely essential.” General Rutland declined to say whether the findings would be released.

What the precedents show

The record on disclosure is mixed. The board report on the 2004 fire aboard HMCS Chicoutimi, which killed one sailor, was eventually published after sustained political pressure, the Globe reported. The 1974 explosion at CFB Valcartier, which killed six teenagers at a cadet camp, was examined in full only when a Quebec coroner held an inquiry. In both cases the account the public eventually got came from outside the military’s own process, or was forced out of it.

That leaves the criminal track, run by the military police and the RCMP, as the only one of the four designed to ask whether anyone is criminally responsible. The others will say what happened and what should change. Prime Minister Mark Carney called the fire one of the worst peacetime tragedies for Canada’s military on home soil, Al Jazeera reported.

Section 45 sets out in four clauses what a board may compel. It says nothing about who else may read what the board finds.