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The Intendancy

history
Since the 1920s, the Canadian government was faced with 2 problems in regard to the armed forces: lack of a centralised commmand structure (all three services operated largely on their own with links being made on a mainly ad hoc basis) and an annual budget that was felt to exceed its actual needs in some areas.

An attempt at unification was made in the 1960s by defence minister Hellyer following suggestion by retired general Foulkes. The first phase was the creation of a Chief of the Defence Staff to replace the formely powerless (and staff-less) Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. This was done in 1964 with the passing of bill C90. A small cabinet reshuffle however saw Hellyer relegated to the backbench (rumours had it that he had a falling out with the prime minister over policies) who quickly resigned to sit as an independent and start his own party, the Action Canada Party.

The new defence minister, caving in to pressure from upper echelons of the armed forces including some naval flag officers going as far as threatening to resign, renounced going foward with phase 2 which would have seen a full unification of the services into a single one. He did however ended up introducing a bill that saw a partial unification with the redundant branches from all 3 services that were not element specific (cathering, communication, health, etc...) to be grouped into a new operational support service to be known as the Intendancy. By grouping them together into a distinct service, it was believed that none of the other one would have undue access to its resources or control over its branches.

Organisation
Members of the service, the ancillaries (or "Gophers" as they are coloquialy called) are grouped by Branches, Trades and Posts (the basic unit within a branch).

The branches are: Chaplain, Communication, Engineering, Inteligence, Legal, Logistics, Musicians, health, Personnel, Policing, Public Affairs & Training

Uniforms
originaly, 2 classes of uniforms were issued: The Service Dress for clerical duties and walking out and the Fatigue Dress for duties where the uniform was expected to get dirty. Other classes (such as mess and ceremonial) were eventualy authorised after repeated demands from some units with traditions dating back to before unification of the branches. These however were optional and purchased privately.

The Service Dress is composed of a white shirt worn with pants, jacket, tie and headgear in dark purple. The headgear is a purle peaked cap with white band for officers and a fedora-type purple hat for other ranks. The jacket is double breasted for officers and single breasted for other ranks. With the addition of white gloves and belt, it served as a ceremonial uniform until the adoption of pre-unification ones by certain branches. The service dress variant remain the uniform worn on formal occasion by those branches without a sepcific one.

The Fatigue dress is composed of heavy duty dark purple pants and shirt worn with or without an overall and a visor cap in the same colour.

Insignias
The authorities decided to maintain a certain level of continuity by continuing to use already established military ranks and so it was decided to do as had been done with the Air Force and introduce a mixture of ranks based on the other 2 services but in a reverse fashion: NCO ones being based on the navy and officers on the army.

Intendancy officers insignias are identical to army ones except that they are silvery white and worn on purple slides. On the combat uniform, they are pale green with a dark purple outline. Other ranks use a combination of graecian collumns, crown and wreath and are worn on the sleeves.

Following the patriation of the constitution in 1982, a number of measures were taken to make the services more distinctively canadian looking. The only major change to affect the Intendancy was the replacement of crowns with maple leaves and the pips, which formely were shaped after the British Order of the Bath, were changed to the shape of the star of the Order of Canada.
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