IN DEPTH: Montreal fake-passport lab and CBSA whistleblower collide with Quebec’s election fight

By JEFF SANDES and ALEX ZOLTANOTTAWA — Quebec is heading into a fall election already arguing over legal migration. A police raid on a Montreal laboratory that allegedly churned out fake Canadian and European passports, and renewed claims from a former Canada Border Services Agency officer about stolen travel documents, have put illegal entry and document fraud back on the table.The Sûreté du Québec said July 21 that its economic-crime unit, working with Montreal and Gatineau police and Quebec’s forensic laboratory, dismantled a Montreal “laboratory” on July 8. One person was arrested and released on a summons.Police said they seized more than 250 items used to make false documents, including Canadian and French passport covers, laminators, printers and bank-card blanks, plus vehicles, two of them as proceeds of crime. Captain Marie-Hélène Poulin said the equipment was “very sophisticated” and capable of high-quality forgeries.The haul, according to the force, included complete passports for Canada, France, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Italy; driver’s licences for Quebec, Ontario, BC, New Brunswick, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Florida; birth certificates for Quebec, Ontario and BC; firearms acquisition certificates; and Quebec health-insurance cards. The suspect faces counts related to forgery, possession or trafficking of counterfeit documents and laundering proceeds of crime. The Sûreté du Québec had no further update when the Western Standard asked.That raid followed a media tour by Luc Sabourin, a former junior officer in CBSA’s National Documents Division. Sabourin says he lost his career and pension after reporting what he describes as corruption and a management culture that still exists.His most explosive claim concerns 2015: hundreds of thousands of lost or stolen passports, and an order, he says, to destroy foreign passports and falsify entries in the Lost, Stolen and Fraudulent Document Database so they would appear to have been returned to issuing embassies. That database is meant to warn officers when someone tries to enter on a compromised book..“This was definitely organized crime with an attempt to bring in a lot of people here in one time, and it was not just a theft of opportunity,” he said.“When I sounded the alarm to management, we received no help. They minimized it. This was the same management we had reported against because they had asked us to destroy passports and falsify information in the database, so they did everything to prevent us from getting the people we needed to enter all these passports. This was gross negligence.”Sabourin has made the same core allegation for years: that he and colleague Shannon Stinner refused an order to shred foreign passports and cook the tracking database, that a junior employee then destroyed about 300 books before the work was halted, and that some of those identities belonged to people wanted for arrest or deportation.CBSA has rejected that account. After earlier reporting by The Bureau, the agency said Sabourin’s destruction allegations “have been thoroughly investigated by impartial persons who have all concluded that no inappropriate destruction occurred,” that destroying identity documents can be “legal and necessary,” and that two workplace investigations plus RCMP fact-finding followed.Sabourin’s own recent media appearances have been thinner. He has said he was threatened, including over his children, and the Western Standard previously reported he stepped back from the public eye after advice to keep a low profile.The warning he still wants on the record is that a blank or stolen passport is more dangerous than an improperly documented arrival at an airport.“Passports are easily worth from $100 to $5,000 per passport, so there’s that money opportunity there,” he said. “But then you have to look at organized crime. They need to bring in somebody from their group to establish a base of operation here. And then you have to look at terrorism, a large volume that gives 500 passports to the worst of the worst to bring their cell in. They have the money for it, to move their people and once they land here, they disappear. They throw away the passport and we don’t know where they are and they already have people waiting to hide them.”That is the case Sabourin has been making in interviews this year, including this recent clip circulating on X..The Western Standard filed an Access to Information request with Canada’s National Document Centre for 2025 statistics on improperly documented arrivals at airports. Most of those interceptions were at Toronto Pearson International Airport, followed by Montréal-Trudeau. The monthly average was 58, and the pace was relatively steady through the year.Sabourin argues those airport catches are not the main risk. Stolen and blank books that can be rewritten as new identities are, he said, and officers only catch them if the database is complete and current..Criminal networks have been caught trying to exploit Canadian documents well before the Montreal lab.Project O-ctopus, an RCMP-led investigation that began in July 2022 with Ontario Provincial Police, CBSA, Akwesasne Mohawk Police and US Border Patrol, targeted human-smuggling groups around Cornwall, Ont., and the Akwesasne territory that straddles the border. CBC later reported the files alleged a Montreal-linked organization trafficked in forged Canadian passports and developed ways to “subvert all regular immigration and security protocols,” with implications for national security. Cellphone evidence included images of forged Canadian passports and blank visitor visas.In November 2024, Jonghun Lee pleaded guilty in Laval to attempting to smuggle 509 blank counterfeit Canadian permanent-resident cards and 506 blank counterfeit Alberta driver’s licences from China, plus forging other Canadian identity documents. He was sentenced to 30 months. CBSA had intercepted a courier parcel from China at Mirabel on January 14, 2022, then found manufacturing equipment and nearly $140,000 in cash at his home.On April 14, 2026, CBSA officers at Pearson’s commercial operations opened a 1,600-kilogram shipment from Nigeria and found seven fraudulent passports hidden in sandals — five purporting to be from The Gambia and two from South Africa, all with the same man’s photograph and different names. RCMP charged Nnenna Oketa, 44, of Caledon, Ont., with possessing a forged passport.CBSA posted the seizure the same day..Document fraud is only one track in a province already fighting over legal numbers.Quebec’s fixed-date election is October 5. The campaign is expected to begin late this month. Former premier François Legault resigned in January. Coalition Avenir Québec is now led by Christine Fréchette; the Quebec Liberals by Charles Milliard. Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has made immigration volume a central argument, and recent polling has had his party first among decided voters.Julien Garon-Carrier, founder of Indocile Media, told the Western Standard the issue will dominate.“Obviously, it’s a hot potato, and let me tell you, the main topic of this campaign is going to be immigration, that’s for sure,” he said. “The party that scores the most in the polls right now is the party that will go stronger on immigration.”That fight is not new. At a Montreal Chamber of Commerce event in September 2022, Legault said taking more than 50,000 immigrants a year while French was in decline would be “a bit suicidal” for Quebec. He later told reporters it was an expression meaning that raising the intake while French receded would be “a bit suicidal for French.”He often said Quebec was absorbing a disproportionate share of Canada’s temporary foreign workers, international students and asylum claimants, straining housing and social services. Around the same period, then-immigration minister Jean Boulet said 80% of immigrants to Quebec go to Montreal and “don’t work, don’t speak French, or don’t adhere to the values of Quebec society.”The RCMP later said officers intercepted about 113,000 people at the Roxham Road crossing in Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle between 2017 and 2023, after asylum seekers used a gap in the Safe Third Country Agreement that then applied only at official ports of entry. The loophole was closed in March 2023; the force later tore down its Roxham facilities as crossings collapsed..A new pressure point arrived this summer. The United States treated Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status as ended effective July 27, after a June Supreme Court decision allowed Washington to proceed with a termination first announced in 2025. Haitian TPS work permits tied to that designation are no longer valid.Amnesty International Canada and the Canadian Council for Refugees, with affected families, have a court challenge arguing Canada is breaching Charter rights and a 2023 Supreme Court ruling by returning claimants to the US without adequate “safety valves.” They say people sent back face detention and possible removal to countries in crisis, including Haiti. A hearing is scheduled for November. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has said the Safe Third Country Agreement still applies.Garon-Carrier said the Haitian file is obvious to anyone who watches Montreal.“It’s mostly like what’s going on in France, England and Germany,” he said. “They have so much illegal immigration, and in Quebec, we’ve been abused because of the Asian population coming in from the United States and nobody was stopping them.“And Haiti, now it’s a failed country and everybody wants to leave because it’s a country run by gangs, and they all go to the United States. But if they must go back [to Haiti], what are they going to do? They all speak French and there is a big community of Haitians in Montreal. They all have family in Montreal, so they will all go.”Tania Longpré teaches French and Quebec culture in elementary school and at university and prepares newcomers for permanent-resident and citizenship exams. She said the argument is louder in Quebec than in other provinces because language and identity are the point.“I don’t know why, here, we talk about it more than other provinces, but it’s the same thing,” she said. “Maybe they are afraid to lose language, or lose culture, or they say more people are here than before? Not just in Montreal, but in Quebec City, in Chicoutimi, and far from the cities.”She dates the modern amplification to about 2009 or 2010. “They started to talk all day about immigration, about language, about culture, about the religious differences. But now, I think it’s really bigger than before, too. And I understand why people are afraid if they don’t share habits, or they want to have other habits. I think it’s normal to be afraid of it a little bit, afraid to lose some identity.”Her classroom view is mixed. Students know French matters, she said, but she cannot speak for what they do after class. “I think they have to conserve their culture, their language, but they have to make another identity. Not to lose the first one, but they have to add another one to participate in the new city, in the new country, to work, and to grow their family. … But new immigrants to become like a new person, it’s not possible.”That is the legal-migration argument PQ has been running for months: lower permanent and temporary intake, recruit from people already here who speak French and work, and stop what Plamondon calls a federally imposed surge. In February he posted a Léger finding that 83% of Quebecers opposed higher thresholds and 52% wanted cuts..In April, he attacked Fréchette’s plan to grant permanent residence to more than 126,000 temporary immigrants as the equivalent of six years of economic-immigration planning..The Western Standard asked Plamondon’s office for an interview or statement. It refused both.Federal Immigration Minister Lena Diab did not reply.The Montreal laboratory is one case. Sabourin’s 2015 spreadsheet is one whistleblower’s exhibit, which CBSA still disputes. Between them sits the question Quebec will vote on in 46 days: how many people the province can absorb, and whether the documents they carry are real.

IN DEPTH: Montreal fake-passport lab and CBSA whistleblower collide with Quebec’s election fight

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