Source: The Conversation – Canada
The fire that swept through Canadian Forces Base Wainwright over the weekend in Alberta killed four soldiers and injured 39 people, including 19 reported in critical condition.
The thoughts of Canadians are with the families, the military community, the people of Wainwright and the responders who answered the call.
But what happened after the fire deserves attention too. Wainwright’s hospital became a triage hub for what the town’s mayor described as the largest mass casualty event the community has ever seen. Patients were also transferred to hospitals in Edmonton, Calgary and Red Deer. The response mobilized 22 ground ambulances, six airplanes and two helicopters.
The Canadian Armed Forces relies on civilian systems for specialized services and mass casualty events.
Civilian health readiness is therefore part of national defence. Thirteen months before Wainwright, Canada rehearsed the challenge of a casualty surge. Its findings deserve action.
A system with little slack
The response to a mass-casualty event does not play out in an otherwise empty health-care system. It competes with everyday care for staff, beds, transport and supplies.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) reports that hospital beds increased by only four per cent between 2014–15 and 2023–24 as Canada’s population grew by 13 per cent. Beds per capita fell by seven per cent.
These national figures don’t establish Alberta’s capacity on the day of the fire, but they show why having enough infrastructure, staff and expertise is so important.
Alberta has two burn centres, in Edmonton and Calgary.
That specialist capacity is an asset. But rural hospitals need staff, supplies and transportation to stabilize severely injured patients and move them safely to burn centres while continuing to serve their own communities.
Canada’s health-care system sits at the centre of what’s known as a polycrisis: several systems are under strain, each situation compounding the other.
Read more:
‘Polycrisis’ may be a buzzword, but it could help us tackle the world’s woes
Climate change is prolonging wildfire seasons. Inflation is squeezing budgets and supply chains. Workforce shortages are persisting after the COVID-19 pandemic. The flu season is surging. The consequences of these crises affect health system response and care.
Wainwright is experiencing its mass casualty event amid this ongoing polycrisis. The question is whether any system can absorb the next shock while still dealing with the last.
What Canada already learned
In September 2025, 79 people from health-care systems across the country, federal agencies and the Canadian Armed Forces gathered in Toronto for Exercise Canada Paratus. Paratus assessed overseas casualties, but the lessons apply to all hazards.
Led by key disaster management teams and leaders, the exercise simulated about 100 casualties a week arriving in provincial and territorial health-care systems in Canada from a war in Europe. The post-exercise report is blunt. Three findings are relevant to planning after Wainwright:
• Capacity: The report identified workforce challenges and the need to expand infrastructure, staffing and expertise for sustained casualty surges.
• Patient tracking: Canada has no integrated system to follow casualties as they move between military and civilian care. At Wainwright, the injured were dispersed across several hospitals within hours.
• Governance: The report called for a federal–provincial–territorial health emergency and security authority with clear leadership, roles and decision rights. At the moment, there’s no organization co-ordinating health-care system capacity across federal, provincial and territorial governments.
Health care is defence infrastructure
NATO already recognizes the link between healthcare and defence. One of its seven baseline requirements for national resilience is the ability to manage mass casualties and disruptive health crises, including functioning civilian health systems and secure medical supplies. Canada’s allies already treat health-care systems as strategic infrastructure, alongside energy grids and supply chains.
At the 2025 Hague NATO summit, allies agreed that up to 1.5 per cent of GDP within their new five per cent defence spending target could support resilience, including civil preparedness.
Finland’s comprehensive security model treats health security as a vital societal function, while Sweden’s total defence approach recognizes healthcare as essential to defence.
Canada should seize this opportunity to make a clear case for health investments that strengthen defence readiness.
5 steps Canada must take
Canada already has the diagnosis. As the polycrisis deepens, sudden events like Wainwright will keep exposing the cost of failing to fill gaps. Here’s how Canada should respond:
First, implement the Paratus recommendations with a public timeline.
Second, create the permanent federal–provincial–territorial health emergency body the report calls for.
Third, build patient tracking that works across civilian and military care, so every casualty can be followed from the scene to recovery.
Fourth, treat surge capacity, including rural hospitals near bases and critical infrastructure, as a defence-relevant investment.
Finally, make the next national exercise a domestic, sudden scenario that applies a sudden mass-casualty event onto a system already under strain. New tools, including AI-enabled polycrisis simulation, allow authorities to rehearse these compounding scenarios before they happen; they’re already being developed.
The clinicians and paramedics who responded at Wainwright were part of Canada’s defence capacity, regardless of whether we call them that.
Paratus asked whether our health system could survive intact if war came to us from overseas. Wainwright answered a harder question: what happens when the emergency is already here.
This article was co-authored by Stacey Litvinchuk, RN, MN, CHE, founder and CEO of Axiora Governance and former senior program officer for provincial surgery operations at Alberta Health Services.
Marcia Clark is affiliated with – President of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada
Bhavini Gohel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/20/wainwright-fire-shows-the-importance-of-health-care-system-resilience-to-canadian-security/