First phase of Army restructuring creates division focused on defending Canada

Canada’s Army formally made one of the biggest changes to its structure in decades Thursday by shifting from divisions based on geography to ones built around specific purposes.

Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Edmonton held a signing ceremony and parade to stand up the 1st Canadian Division, which will serve as the main force responsible for deploying on large-scale combat operations and responding to crises.

Headquartered in Edmonton, the “manoeuvre division” will bring multiple capabilities together under one roof, including tanks and other armour, artillery, light infantry, paratroopers and engineers.

The idea is to prepare the army to rapidly deploy a large force and sustain prolonged operations.

“This is a big change,” Maj.-Gen. Wade Rutland, commander of the new 1st Canadian Division, said in an interview.

“This is not an exercise in restructuring the deck chairs. We’re doing this in order to be more agile, more lethal, more relevant to defend Canada.”

Rutland said the threat environment has changed and the world is returning to large-scale combat operations with hundreds of thousands of soldiers, like the ones in Ukraine.

“We realized that we needed to stand up what we call a war fighting division, which will bring together thousands of troops able to integrate air, cyber, space effects and actually contribute as a really trusted ally into that likely future fight,” he said.

It’s part of a series of structural changes ordered by Lt.-Gen. Michael Wright, who laid out his plan to modernize the army in a 2025 document titled Inflection Point.

Alongside the manoeuvre division, the army is setting up a support division, which will be run out of Kingston, Ont.

The army also is standing up a “defence of Canada” division based out of Montreal, to be known as the 2nd Canadian Division. It’s made up largely of part-time soldiers and will focus on national emergencies and domestic defence.

The 3rd Canadian Division — which traces its history to the First World War and took part in the 1944 D-Day landing at Juno Beach — is being retired to the supplementary Order of Battle.

This retirement happens when a regiment is powered down but continues to exist administratively in case it needs to be returned to duty.

The 3rd’s regular force troops will go into the 1st Division, its reserves and rangers will go into the 2nd division and its support troops will join the support division.

Under the changes, the 1st Canadian Division — a division that dates back to 1915 and helped to capture Vimy Ridge — will command three Canadian Mechanized Brigade Groups, located in Edmonton, Petawawa, Ont., and at CFB Valcartier in Quebec.

It also will oversee the 3rd Light Infantry Regiment, the Canadian Artillery Brigade, 6 Canadian Combat Support Brigade and 1 Canadian Sustainment Brigade.

“It means a lot to us,” Rutland said. “You know, the 1st Division was the first one into the fight in the Second World War. They were the first ones in major combat in Italy, Sicily, in the Second World War.”