Monteregie Trafficking

Ninety Thousand Methamphetamine Tablets, a Firearm and Sixteen Thousand Dollars Out of Two Houses on the Same Street: Longueuil’s Organized Crime Squad Arrests Sébastien Bernatchez, 40, and Marielle Bernatchez, 60, and Publishes Not One Charge (August 28, 2026)

GREENFIELD PARK — Ninety thousand tablets is not a number that appears in a street-level file. It appeared on Friday, August 28, 2026, when Le Courrier du sud published at 3:05 p.m. that the Service de police de l’agglomération de Longueuil had searched two residences on the same avenue in the Greenfield Park borough and come out with close to 90,000 methamphetamine tablets, another 650 grams of the same drug in powder, and more than 200 grams of cocaine.

The unit that ran it is named in the reporting and the name is the point: the SPAL’s Section lutte au crime organisé — Stupéfiants, its organized crime narcotics section. Two people were arrested on Thursday, August 27 and both remain detained. They are Sébastien Bernatchez, 40, and Marielle Bernatchez, 60. The force has put the drugs and property at more than $300,000 and has not published a single charge against either of them.

Ninety Thousand Tablets Is a Wholesale Position

The distinction that matters in a drug file is not the drug, it is the form and the count. Powder is weighed; tablets are counted, and a tablet count tells you the product has already been through a press. Ninety thousand of them did not come out of the two houses on avenue Victoria in the sense of having been made there — nothing in the reporting suggests a laboratory or a press at either address — they came out in the sense of having been stored there.

That is a distribution position rather than a manufacturing one, and it sits several tiers above retail. The 650 grams of powdered methamphetamine alongside it is the more ordinary part of the seizure. The tablets are the part that requires somebody upstream with a press and somebody downstream with a network large enough to absorb the volume, and the SPAL has said nothing about either end.

Two Houses, One Avenue, Two People With the Same Surname

The searches were not spread across the agglomeration. They were two residences on avenue Victoria, and the two people arrested share a surname and are twenty years apart in age. The SPAL has not stated whether Sébastien Bernatchez and Marielle Bernatchez are related, whether they lived at different addresses, or whether one house held the product and the other the proceeds.

Those are ordinary questions and the answers are not in the public record. What is in the public record is that the force considered both addresses necessary, that both were held rather than released, and that a woman of sixty is among them — a demographic that appears rarely enough in trafficking files on this beat to be worth noting without being read as anything more.

The Tactical Group, the Dogs, and What That Says About the Threat Assessment

The list of units the SPAL credits is unusually long for a two-address warrant: intelligence, specialized patrol, forensic identification, EMSECO, SPECTRE, canine handlers and the force’s own tactical intervention group, with the Sûreté du Québec’s tactical group brought in on top of it.

A service does not borrow a provincial tactical team for a routine door. Two tactical groups on two residential addresses in a suburban borough is a risk posture, and the firearm recovered inside is the fact that most plainly justifies it in hindsight. The SPAL has not described that weapon in any way — not its type, not whether it was loaded, not where in either house it was found — and until it does, the count it will support is unknown.

An Organized Crime Squad, and No Organization

The SPAL ran this through the section of the service whose mandate is organized crime, and closed its public remarks by asking residents to keep helping in what it called the fight against organized crime and drug trafficking. It did not name a group. Not a club, not a family, not a street organization.

That distinction is worth holding onto. A file worked by an organized crime unit is not the same thing as a file attributed to an organization, and the second is a claim only police can make. They have not made it here. What has been established is the shape of the operation — wholesale volume, two addresses, a firearm, $16,000 in cash and a $300,000 valuation — and none of it has been tested in court, because no charge has yet been published against either of the two arrested.