CFB Chilliwack Closure in 1995 Still Resented

Jim Harris, 59, orients himself by looking at the empty shell of what was the junior ranks club of the late, lamented Canadian Forces Base Chilliwack, in B.C.'s lush Fraser Valley. His barracks were here, he says, striding across a mangy patch of lawn to the spot where his bunk would have been. He'd first arrived here in the rain, as a 16-year-old kid from Brantford, Ont. His parents were dead. There'd been a spot of legal trouble, and the judge offered some career advice. "Join the army, boy," he'd said.

Smart move. There was an army apprentice program at the time. Harris got an education and training as a sapper, a military engineer. From its hurried wartime construction in 1942, until then-finance minister Paul Martin triggered its closure as part of a series of military personnel cuts and base consolidation in his 1995 federal budget, CFB Chilliwack was the home of the engineer branch of the Canadian Forces. Military engineers are usually the first to arrive and last to leave trouble spots around the globe, building - or destroying, as the case may be - airfields, roads and water supplies. They ford rivers or demolish bridges, they render minefields safe. By the time Harris left military service in 1994, he'd visited 28 countries, served as camp sergeant major at one of Canada's Gulf War bases in Qatar, and was an expert in bomb disposal.

More than that, he'd found a family in the military, and a home at this base. Today, its imprint is as faint and decayed as a footprint in sand, but Harris, president of the CFB Chilliwack Historical Society, is among many in this city of 70,000 who keep alive the memory of this base - and of the Liberal government that killed it. Touring the site on a recent June day, he and his friend Jim Lobé, 66, a long-retired military engineer and vice-president of the historical society, stop at the All Sappers' Cenotaph, an imposing stone monument quarried and constructed by engineers after the Second World War, and still meticulously maintained. They stand on the lawn of the officers' mess where Princess Margaret boogied to a military band playing Rock Around the Clock. Harris points to the pole where he had the tearful honour of lowering the flag for the final time at the former Canadian Forces School of Military Engineering. The building, now used by a local high school, was still under construction when the base closure was announced. "They hurt a lot of people out here," Lobé says of the Liberals. "This was quite a base."

British Columbia has long had a chicken-and-egg relationship with the powers that be in Ottawa: which came first, B.C.'s alienation from the federal government, or the feds' alienation from B.C.? In only three of the the past 10 elections have provincial voters strongly supported the party that formed the government. The result, in the prevailing view, is a dearth of political gravy flowing west, and a torrent of voter cynicism flowing east. The closure of CFB Chilliwack, many locals agree, is a prime example of the cycle.

Many connected to the base offer variations of the same conspiracy theory: the 1995 military cuts targeted opposition ridings to the benefit of Liberal strongholds. Both the Fraser Valley and Calgary were Reform party country when the 1995 budget closed the bases in those cities and consolidated operations in Liberal-friendly Edmonton. Chilliwack's engineering school, meanwhile, relocated to CFB Gagetown, N.B., in the Fredericton riding of Liberal MP Andy Scott. "That was a political decision and it just didn't make any sense," says retired Lt.-Col. Ralph Keen, 72, wearing a cap embroidered with "First in. Last out" - a motto of Canadian Military Engineers. He's spent the morning with other volunteers working on the base archives, part of a determined effort to keep its memory alive. As for the Liberal legacy in Chilliwack, he says, "Oh, we won't forget."

Chilliwack Mayor Clint Hames, 50, prefaces his comments with a reluctance to politicize the issue, before diving right in. "You can look at the politics of that decision and it stands out pretty clearly what was going on," he says. Like many in the community, Hames has strong ties to the base. His father was a major in the engineering corps. Part of Hames's childhood was spent as a PMQ brat, one of the kids living in the base's Permanent Married Quarters. Actor Michael J. Fox, whose father, William, was a sergeant specialist in encryption and decoding, was another childhood resident. Fox wrote fondly of Chilliwack's "well-guarded government real estate" in Lucky Man, his best-selling memoir. "PMQs were tidy neighbourhoods where folks quickly forged new friendships or re-established old ones," Fox wrote. "Everybody looked out for everybody else and everybody was in the same socioeconomic boat."

Hames, a city councillor when the base closed, says the community had rebuffed attempts to close the base under the previous Progressive Conservative government. The Liberals, however, left no room for further debate, even as the government spent millions at the doomed site. "There were buildings they hadn't finished yet on the base," Hames says. "There were tradespeople working on those buildings after the base was closed - that's how ridiculous the decision was."

The closure left B.C. - an earthquake zone - as the only region of the country without a military land forces base. The closest reinforcements to the province's modest reserve units are now in Edmonton, perhaps an hour by air if a natural disaster leaves B.C. airports intact and if there are transport planes available to fly, or at least a day away if a truck convoy is assembled to rumble through the Rocky Mountains. British Columbia's perceived vulnerability carried little weight with Liberal government, says Chilliwack native Chuck Strahl, then the Reform MP for the region and now its Conservative candidate. "I think overall it did add to the cynicism people felt toward the Liberals, not just in my riding but generally."

The closure cost Chilliwack its largest single employer, with about 2,000 jobs, and ripped out part of its soul. For more than 50 years, there'd hardly been a civic event at which the base wasn't represented by its leadership, its labour or its military majesty. Even today, there's an impressive presence of ex-base members leading service clubs or sitting on local boards and committees. Strahl's two main rivals in this election campaign are both ex-military men who'd served at CFB Chilliwack. Liberal Bob Besner was a commandant of the Canadian Forces Officer Candidate School, and New Democrat Rollie Keith was a former instructor and tank officer.

Even Besner's opponents concede that the Liberal government's decision to kill the base is rarely raised as a doorstep issue in this campaign. There was, briefly, media-created speculation that Conservative Leader Stephen Harper's platform to boost military spending included a plan to reopen the base. None of the candidates consider that likely. "I think there's general consensus that its time has come and gone," says Keith. "It wouldn't be very practical."

Much of the base sat fallow for years after its closure, an additional aggravation for the community. In recent years, however, the site has gone through a rebirth. The RCMP have established a busy training facility at the former officer candidate school. National Defence continues to operate a small Area Support Unit on the site supporting B.C.'s scattered reserve forces, and there are plans to re-establish a small military engineering presence on the base. The military passed a test in the minds of many British Columbians during the devastating forest fires last summer by quickly assembling an effective firefighting force of 2,700 reservists and career soldiers, sailors and air crew.

Redevelopment of much of the rest of the base has been turned over to Canada Lands Co., a self-financing Crown corporation with a mandate to extract community and taxpayer benefit from surplus federal lands. It's in the midst of creating a residential neighbourhood from gutted and restored married quarters and new housing. Negotiations are also underway to create an education park. The base site is expected to house campuses for the University College of the Fraser Valley, the Justice Institute of B.C. and Beijing Normal University - part of Chilliwack's transformation from a military to a university town.

The belated redevelopment has the backing of the community and its political leadership, but not many expect that to reduce the animus toward the federal government. To Mayor Hames, the closing of CFB Chilliwack, his one-time home, is symptomatic of B.C.'s irrelevance to central governments of any political stripe. The province lacks the clout of the only base that really matters - the seat-rich foundation of Ontario and Quebec. All B.C. voters can do is voice their frustration, he says: "Send the people who are going to deliver the protest message the loudest, because we know it doesn't matter what government is there." There are chasms even army engineers can't bridge.

Maclean's July 1, 2004