Quebec’s police ethics tribunal has barred retired Montreal police officer Serge Blais from exercising peace-officer functions for 17 months after finding that he knowingly prepared a false traffic report and acted despite a conflict of interests involving a towing company.
In Le Commissaire à la déontologie policière c. L’agent Serge Blais, file C-2025-5562-3, Administrative Judge Benoit Mc Mahon imposed a 15-month disqualification for the report and a consecutive two-month period for the conflict. The September 1, 2026 decision addressed sanction following findings of misconduct made on January 16.
The tribunal said an unpaid suspension totalling 17 days would otherwise have been appropriate. Because Blais had retired, it instead used the Police Act’s authority to disqualify a former officer from peace-officer duties. The operative order is measured in months, not days.
A traffic stop amid a longstanding dispute
The case arose from a January 10, 2022 stop of a driver working for Top Speed, a Montreal towing company with which Blais had a longstanding conflict.
Blais issued the driver a ticket alleging that he had proceeded while the light remained red. The tribunal’s earlier findings, recounted in the sanction decision, established that the traffic light had changed to flashing green.
The abbreviated offence report also falsely stated that pedestrians were at the intersection and that the driver had said he thought he had seen a stop sign. The tribunal treated these inaccuracies as serious, noting that the alleged pedestrians could have been an aggravating factor against the driver.
Mc Mahon found that Blais had maliciously used his traffic-law knowledge and ticketing power to harm Top Speed’s interests. He also emphasized that the officer could have ended the intervention after placing himself in a conflict, rather than proceeding to prepare the false report.
Separate consequences for separate misconduct
The commissioner sought disqualification periods totalling 45 months: 35 months for the false report and 10 months for the conflict, to run consecutively. Blais proposed 10 months and two months, to run concurrently.
The tribunal explained that police discipline serves public protection, deterrence and professional standards rather than punishment. The governing considerations included the seriousness of the misconduct in its context and the officer’s disciplinary record. Comparable decisions provided guidance, but did not displace an individualized assessment.
Blais had more than 30 years of police service and this was his first police ethics entry. His testimony nevertheless disclosed no concrete, substantial mitigating factor, the tribunal found. He said the merits decision had taught him the importance of personally observing the facts supporting a traffic ticket. Mc Mahon regarded that explanation as aggravating rather than mitigating for someone with 17 years of traffic-enforcement experience.
For the conflict count, the tribunal reduced what would otherwise have been a four-month disqualification to two months to account for the cumulative effect of consecutive periods. It distinguished the decision to continue the conflicted intervention from the subsequent false report.
The resulting 17-month order concerned two misconduct counts. Two other counts had been conditionally stayed at the merits stage. In settling on the total, the tribunal said the sanction reflected the seriousness of the conduct without extinguishing every possibility of a future career change for the retired officer.
