Two arrested in child porn probe jailed for five years

Two men, including the former director general of the city of Lorraine, were sentenced to fiveyear prison terms at the Montreal courthouse on Wednesday in a case where their past sins caught up to them.

Roger Lepage, 76, and Jean-Marc St. Hilaire, 68, were both arrested in January 2016 in Operation Malaise, a Sûreté du Québec investigation into a computer-savvy child pornography network through which, in some cases, pedophiles exchanged written accounts of how they had sexually abused children in the past.

As Quebec Court Judge Pierre Labelle delivered his decision Wednesday, he noted that Lepage and St. Hilaire’s written accounts were so detailed SQ investigators were able to track down their past victims of sexual abuse with ease, even though some of it occurred more than two decades ago.

“The Court can only imagine the immense shock the victims experienced when the police contacted them,” Labelle said before sentencing the men.

“The testimony of your victims will resound in my ears for a long time,” the judge said specifically to Lepage. In November, one of Lepage’s four victims testified that his life as an adult has been a disaster because of the abuse Lepage put him through as a boy.

With term served factored into their sentences Lepage, the director general of Lorraine between 1980 and 2000, and St. Hilaire, who admitted to having sexually abused nine boys, were left with prison terms of two years less a day. Both men also received longterm offender designations, which means the Parole Board of Canada can attach strict conditions to monitor their eventual releases from detention centres — for five years in Lepage’s case and three years in St. Hilaire’s.

As part of their guilty pleas, the pedophiles admitted they sexually abused the same two boys during the summer of 2000 in Valleyfield. Lepage admitted he abused his four victims between 1995 and 2003.

Fifteen men in all were charged in Operation Malaise. The fiveyear sentences are the longest to be delivered in the case so far.