www.canadiansoldiers.com

On 1 February 1968, Bill C-243, The Canadian Forces Reorganization Act became law and the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) were combined into one service - the Canadian Forces. This process was accomplished by "integration" of the three services, and then Unification into a homogenous organization.

Early Attempts

While some serious study had been given to unifying the three services (navy, army, and air force) as early as the 1930s, it was under Minister of National Defence Brooke Claxton in the 1950s that Canada began to earnestly consider the possibility of unification (also known as "integration").

Claxton, who served as MND from 1946 to 1954, ran the three services under a single ministry, and created the position of Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee in 1951, in order to coordinate the efforts of the three services and allow the Minister to receive advice from the military with respect to fulfilling a singular defence policy rather than three separate policies.

The structure worked. RMC became a tri-service institution; the military's padres, legal services, and dental and medical services were coordinated; and one service or another operated various functions for the other two. The process continued under George Pearkes, Diefenbaker's first Defence Minister, as procurement of food and postal services became tri-service. To go beyond this point in the face of entrenched habits and traditions required a minister with rare determination. (Paul) Hellyer proved to be that man.¹

Paul Hellyer had served in the RCAF in the Second World War, and was remustered to the Army in 1944 during the Conscription Crisis, where he was required to take a basic training course again. Hellyer's impressions of duplications in the services were carried with him when he became a Member of Parliament for Toronto and Minister of National Defence in the Lester Pearson government. "The Prime Minister, some believed, also remembered the Suez difficulties over the Queen's Own Rifles and supported Hellyer's plans."²

These plans included reshaping defence policy to focus on the three national priorities as Hellyer saw them: collective security under the UN, collective security through NATO, and the defence of North America. Hellyer's determination was that Canada would decide for itself how to organize itself to meet these commitments and Hellyer proposed eliminating costly duplications of services by integration. Recruiting, basic training, and the military colleges would all be done on a "tri-services" basis.

Phase One - Integration 1964-1966

The March 1964 White Paper on Defence outlined a major restructuring of the separate services, describing a new organization that would integrate operations, logistics support, personnel and administration of the separate services under a single unified command system.

The process actually began in 1964, when Bill C-90 "An Act to Amend the National Defence Act" was passed by Parliament on 7 Jul 1964 and took effect 1 Aug of that year.

The three service chiefs were replaced by a single Chief of the Defence Staff and the separate headquarters were integrated into a single Canadian Forces Headquarters. Other offices that disappeared were that of Vice Chief of the General Staff, Adjutant General, Quartermaster General, and Master General of the Ordnance.

In Jun 1965, the services themselves were reorganized into an integrated field structure, reducing 11 existing commands in Canada to just six:

Maritime Command
Mobile Command
Air Defence Command
Air Transport Command
Materiel Command
Training Command

Phase 2 - Unification 1966-1968

This second phase was dependent on Parliamentary approval of Bill C-243 "The Canadian Forces Reorganization Act", which was introduced into the House of Commons in Nov 1966 and passed in Apr 1967.

The major effect of this legislation was to abolish the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army, and the Royal Canadian Air Force and the creation of a single service called the Canadian Armed Forces (or just Canadian Forces).

With approval of this bill into law, the armed forces underwent reorganization of command and base structures across the country, with streamlined organizations designed to reduce costs and duplications and provide a functionally organized military that was highly mobile and not bound by service traditions.

As well, one single uniform and rank structure was introduced into the Canadian Forces, a move that was unpopular and never fully implemented (personnel of Maritime Command, for example, maintained their naval rank designations). These latter implementations of policy are generally referred to as "unification".

According to Canadian Forces publication B-GG-005-004/AF-000 "CANADIAN FORCES OPERATIONS":

While Unification was ostensibly undertaken for cost savings, it has also been suggested that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Defence Minister Paul Hellyer did not care for the traditions behind each service and that the new Canadian Forces (in Canada's post-war modernist fashion) was easily translated to French. Some further contend that a deliberate move away from monarchist references (use of the word "Royal" in many corps titles, for example) was intended, though the use of the Crown in official insignia including official badges and crests of units and bases would seem to dispute that.
: ...The Honorable Paul Hellyer, the Minister of National Defence throughout the period of the reorganization, viewed this last phase in the reorganization as the end of a logical, continuous process to create a unified force. In the House of Commons during the 27th Parliament he stated:; Unification is the end objective of a logical and evolutionary progression. Although integration and unification are sometimes regarded as alternatives, and inherently different, they are, in fact, merely different stages in the same process. Integration was actually the term applied to the first stages of the unification of the Canadian Armed Forces.

The Canadian Forces remained a single service into the 21st Century, but beginning in the 1980s, each member would come to belong to one of three "environments": sea, land or air, usually determined by the member's trade. Environmentally non-specific trades (referred to as "purple" trades such as medical technician or military police, an environment may have been assigned at random.)³

Notes

Granatstein, Jack Canada's Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, 2002) ISBN 0802046916 p.352
Ibid, p.352
The new system of environmental classifications was accompanied by a return to different coloured uniforms. The term "purple trades" comes from the notion that mixing army tan, army green, white, air force blue and navy blue together will yield a purple shade.