Quebec’s provincial police seized more than 250 items used to manufacture counterfeit documents when they raided a Montreal laboratory on July 8, among them Canadian and French passport covers, bank card blanks, laminators, and printers. The Sûreté du Québec (SQ) disclosed the operation on July 21.
Captain Marie-Hélène Poulin, who heads the force’s economic crimes and cybercrime investigation service, said the site could produce complete passports for Canada, France, Switzerland, Czechia, and Italy. Her list ran on to driver’s licenses for six Canadian provinces and for Florida, birth certificates, firearms acquisition licenses, and Quebec health insurance cards.
Poulin described the seized equipment as “very sophisticated, permitting the manufacture of high-quality documents.”
Police arrested one man and released him on a summons. No charges have been laid, though the SQ named four offenses he could face, including forgery, trafficking in a counterfeit document, and laundering proceeds of crime. Officers seized vehicles as well, two of them as proceeds of crime, and are working to recover money from a bank account.
The communiqué is silent on scale. How many documents the lab produced, who bought them, what they cost, and whether any are now in circulation all go unmentioned.
Not the SQ’s first document lab
On March 21, 2025, the same force raided a document-manufacturing site on rue Chabanel Ouest in Ahuntsic-Cartierville, recovering close to 1,000 forged identity documents. Canadian residence cards and Quebec health insurance cards were among them.
Three men were arrested over that lab in February and appeared at the Joliette courthouse on charges of producing forged documents and possessing identifying information belonging to others. La Presse put the number of real identities allegedly used by the network at up to 2,400.
Whether the July lab and the Chabanel operation belong to the same enterprise is a question the SQ has left unanswered.
A provincial file for a federal document
Passports are issued by Ottawa, yet the SQ listed only municipal and provincial partners on the July raid: the Montreal and Gatineau police forces, plus Quebec’s forensic science and legal medicine laboratory. Neither the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) nor the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) appears anywhere in the announcement, and the March 2025 raid ran the same way.
Federal agencies have been busy elsewhere. The RCMP charged three men in March, two of them Montreal residents, after CBSA officers found six forged Canadian passports and document-production equipment at the Peace Bridge crossing in Fort Erie, Ontario.
Ottawa’s own document trouble this year has run in the opposite direction. In June the federal immigration department began suspending citizenship certificates issued under the new descent rules, citing evidentiary standards rather than any allegation of fraud.
Forged immigration paper commands a market price wherever anyone has troubled to publish one. A Malaysian syndicate broken up in April sold counterfeit MM2H stickers at roughly US$2,530 apiece to Chinese nationals building credibility for US visa applications.
What the Chabanel case eventually produced was a mailing list. The SQ said it would write to every person whose stolen identity it could trace, urging them to safeguard their own data.
