Most air bases are sited for what they can reach. Cold Lake was sited for what surrounded it. In 1952 the Royal Canadian Air Force went looking in Alberta’s Lakeland district for somewhere it could drop live weapons without hitting anybody, and settled on a spot west of the former town of Grand Centre on the Saskatchewan border. The criteria were low population density, accessibility, weather, suitable terrain and, above all, land nobody else needed. Personnel arrived on 31 March 1954 and operations at RCAF Station Cold Lake began that day.

The following year Ottawa signed an agreement with Alberta and Saskatchewan for a tract 180 kilometres long and 65 kilometres wide, about 11,700 square kilometres, which became the Cold Lake Air Weapons Range. The official record is careful to note that although the siting tried to avoid First Nations reserves, the range took in traditional Aboriginal and treaty areas, and the First Nations affected were eventually compensated.

The airfield is named after a man rather than a place: Cold Lake/Group Captain R.W. McNair Airport, for Robert Wendell "Buck" McNair, a Saskatchewan-born Spitfire pilot and one of the leading Canadian aces of the Second World War. It is one of only three military aerodromes in Canada named for an individual, alongside Moose Jaw and the heliport at Valcartier.

The flying task has changed roughly once a decade. The 1950s and early 1960s were about training crews for the CF-100 Canuck all-weather interceptor. From 1962 the CF-104 Starfighter turned the base into the pipeline for Canada’s nuclear strike and reconnaissance commitment in West Germany. From 1982 it has been the Hornet base, and from the late 2020s it will be the F-35 base. Six of its hangars and the senior non-commissioned officers’ building went on to the federal heritage register in 2000 and 2001.

The Cold Lake Air Weapons Range is the largest block of controlled military airspace in Canada, and its contents are more elaborate than the phrase "bombing range" suggests. It holds over 640 individual targets and around 100 realistic target complexes: seven simulated aerodromes complete with runways, tarmac, parked aircraft, dispersal areas and buildings, mechanised equipment including tanks, simulated radar sites and missile launchers, mock industrial plant and command and control centres. A crew can attack something that looks like a real airfield and be scored on whether they hit the right part of it.

Where Nevada gives the American ranges desert, Cold Lake gives heavy boreal forest and thousands of lakes. That was always presented as the point: the terrain resembles northern Europe, and for most of the Cold War northern Europe was where Canadian fighter crews expected to fight. It is also cold, which is its own training value; NASA and European Space Agency astronauts have used the area for winter survival training.

The range put Cold Lake into the international news in the 1980s, when the United States Air Force used it as the terminus for tests of newly developed air-launched cruise missiles. The weapons were released from bombers over the Beaufort Sea and flew down the Mackenzie River valley at a few tens of metres above the ground, following the terrain, to the range. Peace groups and First Nations along the flight path objected, arguing the tests made Canada a participant in a destabilising arms race. The Federal Court of Canada ruled in 1983 that the tests could proceed, and the Canada–United States Test and Evaluation Program was signed afterwards to cover the use of Canadian airspace.

The range has never been the air force’s alone. Indigenous groups hunt on it under the agreed usage arrangements, and since the 1990s the oil and gas industry has moved in underneath the bombs: Canadian Natural Resources runs cyclic steam stimulation and steam-assisted gravity drainage projects at Primrose and Wolf Lake inside the range boundary, and other producers work parts of it too. Fishing and logging compete for the same ground. Managing all of that alongside live weapons delivery is now a permanent part of 4 Wing’s job.

Red Flag was invented because the United States Air Force worked out in Vietnam that around ninety per cent of its combat losses happened in a pilot’s first ten missions, and that if you could give a crew those ten missions in peacetime they were far more likely to survive the real ones. Canada copied the idea almost immediately. The exercise was conceived in 1977 as Red Flag North and renamed Maple Flag for its first running in 1978. It was held twice a year until 1987 and annually thereafter.

It has been cancelled when the air force had somewhere more pressing to be, which is a fair summary of Canadian defence policy: in 1991 for the Gulf War, in 1999 for Operation Allied Force over Kosovo, in 2011 for Operation Mobile over Libya, and in 2015 for Operations Impact and Reassurance. It was paused again in 2019 so the infrastructure and the mandate could be brought up to date.

The numbers from a single recent edition give the scale. Maple Flag 2016 ran from 30 May to 24 June with more than 1,300 Canadian Armed Forces personnel and over 400 from six allied and partner nations, including the United States Air Force and Marine Corps, the Royal Air Force, the French Air Force, German paratroopers and a Belgian artillery unit. It generated 1,137 sorties and 1,945.08 flying hours, recorded 1,063 simulated air-to-air kills, attacked 257 target complexes, dropped eight live and 69 inert weapons and passed 1,070,400 lb of fuel in the air.

The opposing force has changed hands. American F-16s of the 64th Aggressor Squadron have flown Redland for years, but in October 2017 Discovery Air Defence won the ten-year Contracted Airborne Training Services contract to provide Canada’s adversary air with modernised Alpha Jets. The contractor’s aircraft — Alpha Jets and A-4 Skyhawks, now under the Top Aces name — are based at Cold Lake, which means the base is permanently home to jets that are not the air force’s.

Cold Lake is the only place in Canada where a pilot becomes a fighter pilot. 410 Tactical Fighter Operational Training Squadron has run the Hornet conversion course since the type arrived, and the Fighter Operational Test and Evaluation Flight does the work of proving weapons, software and tactics on the same ramp. In 2007 a television crew followed eight students through the 410 course for the series Jetstream, which remains the closest thing Canada has to a public record of what the course demands.

Ahead of the conversion course sat lead-in training, and that is the piece that has gone. 419 Squadron re-formed at Cold Lake on 2 May 1975 as a tactical fighter training squadron, flew the CF-5 until the type retired in 1995, was stood down, and re-formed again on 23 July 2000 with nine CT-155 Hawks under the NATO Flying Training in Canada programme. On 8 March 2024 it ceased operations and went into hiatus, and the Hawk left Canadian service with it.

The consequence is blunt: Canada has no domestic fighter lead-in training. Students are sent to Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas, to Finland and to the International Flight Training School in Italy, then come back to Cold Lake for the Hornet. The air force intends to reactivate 419 in the early 2030s with a new trainer.

The squadron carries one of the heavier names in the Canadian order of battle. 419 was formed at Mildenhall in 1941, flew 4,325 operational sorties with Bomber Command and lost 129 aircraft on them, and was the squadron of Pilot Officer Andrew Mynarski, who was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for trying to free a trapped gunner from a burning Lancaster on the night of 12/13 June 1944. Its "Moose" name comes from its first commanding officer, Wing Commander John "Moose" Fulton, killed on operations in 1942, and every commanding officer since has carried the nickname.

The physical work started before the aircraft was chosen. On 27 August 2020 the government awarded a $9.2 million design contract for future fighter facilities at Cold Lake; a parallel award for Bagotville followed on 2 October 2020. Both bases were named as the two main operating bases for whatever aircraft won, and both needed new squadron buildings, maintenance facilities and, at Bagotville, a purpose-built quick reaction alert compound.

The aircraft was settled on 9 January 2023, when Canada finalised an agreement for 88 F-35A aircraft at a stated $19 billion covering equipment, sustainment set-up, services and infrastructure. First deliveries were anticipated from 2026 and full operational capability between 2032 and 2034.

Then the politics moved. On 14 March 2025 Prime Minister Mark Carney ordered a review of the purchase, in the middle of a tariff dispute with the United States, with the first sixteen aircraft already paid for and the balance reconsidered. As of September 2026 the government is still weighing the options, including a mixed fleet. The first Canadian aircraft are going to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, where Canadian pilots will train; aircraft are expected on Canadian soil in 2028.

What that means at Cold Lake is a base spending most of a decade under construction for an aeroplane whose final number nobody will state. The CF-188s it is replacing are older than most of the people flying them, and the squadrons have to keep the western half of the NORAD alert commitment running through all of it, which is the part of the argument that does not appear in the press releases.