On any given day, drones buzz within the skies above Quebec’s detention centres trying to drop tobacco, medicine or cellphones to the inmates beneath.
Statistics from Quebec’s public safety minister present workers reported 274 drones flying over provincial centres between January and March — or simply over three per day. That doesn’t embrace the ten federally-managed prisons within the province.
Corrections spokespeople and a drone skilled say the issue is rising, harmful and laborious to cease, regardless of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} invested by provincial and federal governments.
Stéphane Blackburn, the managing director for Quebec’s correctional providers, described the specter of airborne contraband as “one thing we face each day.”
The provincial figures present 195 of the 247 drones had been seen dropping packages. Most of them — 69 per cent — had been reported as seized. The province additionally seized 896 cellphones.
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However the information exhibits drone sightings have been rising regularly in recent times.
There have been 695 drone sightings logged from April 2021 to the top of March of 2022. For a similar interval between 2024 and 2025, there have been 1,175. They’re additionally more and more being noticed outdoors Montreal.
“A couple of years in the past, it was primarily within the metropolitan area that we noticed drone occasions,” Blackburn stated. “Montreal has been subjected to the issues for a number of years now, and now we see an increase in drone occasions in sure areas.”
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Blackburn says the commonest types of contraband are tobacco and hashish, though cellphones, instruments and different medicine are additionally seized.
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In current weeks, the province has introduced an extra $38.5 million value of measures aimed toward curbing contraband smuggling. These embrace technological options resembling drone and cellphone detectors, and bodily infrastructure together with fencing or netting round home windows and courtyards.
Staff may also be utilizing cellular X-ray scanners and physique scanners to detect objects as soon as they’ve been delivered.
The federal authorities additionally introduced a pilot challenge in March that can enable correctional workers to make use of radio-frequency jammers to dam wi-fi communication to drones and cellphones in federal and Quebec detention centres.
Frédérick Lebeau, the nationwide president of the Union of Canadian Correction officers, stated the rise in drone drops in correctional services has been “exponential” in recent times.
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“We are able to discuss a number of drops a day — three, 4, it relies upon,” he stated.
He stated drops occur usually when inmates are within the yard, and packages are shortly snapped up and hidden in physique cavities or elsewhere. Typically, drones are flown on to home windows the place inmates have dismantled the bars.
He stated the presence of contraband — together with medicine and weapons — can create money owed amongst inmates and permit legal networks to function, leading to elevated violence for detainees and corrections workers alike.
“It’s actually an ecosystem,” he stated. “If there are extra money owed, there’s extra violence. If there’s extra consuming, extra medicine, there’s violent (incidents) the place we have now to intervene.”
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Lebeau stated that whereas new bulletins by the completely different ranges of presidency are “a step ahead,” most of the measures have solely been put in place in a couple of establishments. Particularly, he says there’s a necessity for extra jammers to cease drones from reaching jails and prisons, in addition to physique scanners to catch the medicine as soon as they’re dropped.
“It’s not simply detecting drones, we have now to catch them,” he stated.
Jeremy Laliberte, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ottawa’s Carleton College, says drones are a perfect software for delivering contraband as a result of they’re “ubiquitous, cheap,” and could be launched from kilometres away.
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“The oldsters who wish to do that should buy them for a couple of hundred {dollars}, modify them, take away any figuring out data and launch them and never even fear about getting them again,” he stated.
He stated the battle in Ukraine — in addition to home issues about malicious operators — have spurred a rising curiosity in counter-drone know-how, together with higher detectors that may find each the drone and the operator. Nonetheless, these programs are costly and sophisticated to develop, whereas “the drones themselves are tons of of {dollars}.”
Laliberte stated bodily obstacles resembling fencing and netting in addition to the detectors, jammers, and scanners can all work to guard detention centres, although he notes decided operators can discover a approach round anyone measure.
That’s why he says a layered mannequin that mixes completely different methods — the so-called “Swiss cheese mannequin” — has one of the best likelihood of success.
“There isn’t going to be only one technique that’s going to be the magic bullet that stops all the pieces,” he stated. “It’s going to should be a mixture of issues, as a result of the know-how, it’s like an arms race. There’s at all times going to be individuals attempting to get higher at this.”
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