Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First, I'd like to say hello to all the members of the committee and to thank them for the opportunity to appear before the committee today.
My name is Benoît Dubé, and I have been the director of criminal investigation with Sûreté du Québec since 2020. Before that, starting in 2003, I spent most of my career fighting organized crime.
Sûreté du Québec is our provincial police force, which is responsible, in particular, for coordinating the fight against organized crime across Quebec in cooperation with our municipal, indigenous, provincial, national and international partners.
The fight against organized crime and the various types of criminal activity generally associated with it are Sûreté du Québec's priorities and those of our partners.
In 2017, we reviewed the structure of our investigation units so we could take simultaneous and coordinated action at all hierarchical levels of the criminal networks under investigation, the level of the most influential players and the local and regional levels. In our jargon, that's what we call a three-level strategy.
To guide and optimize investigative plan selection, we also attached organized crime intelligence teams directly to our investigation units, thus constituting what we call intelligence-based police services.
In the past two years, we have improved this structure by acquiring additional funding from the federal and provincial governments. In November 2019, thanks to the firearms-related violence and gangs action fund, we established two new teams, one dedicated to firearms manufacturing, importing and trafficking cases and the other to organized-crime-related disappearances and murders.
We are also deploying measures in response to the Quebec government's launch of Operation Centaur. As part of that operation, we have expanded the team detailed to firearms cases, which has become a joint team combining members of Sûreté du Québec, or SQ, the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal, or SPVM, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the RCMP, and the Canada Border Services Agency, CBSA. That team is now called the integrated weapons enforcement team, the EILTA, and it is headquartered in the Montreal area. We are also setting up an EILTA in Quebec City together with the Service de police de la Ville de Québec.
The mandate of these teams is to establish cases involving the manufacture, supply and importing of firearms. To strengthen investigation capacity at both local and regional levels, resources have also been added to all our six joint regional squads and local investigation teams, which are scattered across the province.
As part of Operation Centaur, these teams respectively have a mandate to establish simple weapons possession and distribution cases. We are therefore working simultaneously on weapons possession, procurement and distribution, thus implementing our strategy at three levels, as I just mentioned.
The cooperation of our partners is of course essential to ensuring the success of the activities deployed as part of the fight against armed violence. Our various joint investigation teams are backed by the involvement of the RCMP, CBSA, the Ontario Provincial Police, or OPP, and 26 municipal police forces, 7 of which have just joined us as part of Operation Centaur.
Sûreté du Québec is also proceeding with the devolution of resources among the partner organizations, which are the RCMP and its National Weapons Enforcement Support Team, or NWEST, the Ontario Provincial Police's Biker Enforcement Unit, the Akwesasne Mohawk Police Service, in order to step up intelligence exchange, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
I would emphasize that the Quebec government has also announced further investment in various entities taking part in Operation Centaur, including its prosecution branch, the Direction des poursuites criminelles et pénales, and its forensic lab, the Laboratoire des sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale.
As you can see, many measures have been put in place in recent years to step up the fight against organized crime and armed violence.
To give you an idea of the scope of these measures, at Sûreté du Québec, we're talking about a structure that has expanded from 245 police investigative resources to 330 resources, which represents an increase of nearly 35% in barely two years. The addition of all those new resources has inevitably resulted in more operations and arrests.