Profile: Marc Gaudreau

Unveiling the truth on the page

For Marc Gaudreau, handwriting, counterfeit products, biological agents, DNA, fumigants, and radiation and explosives detection are all part of a regular day.

Marc Gaudreau loves responding to challenges and that’s exactly what his career in the Public Service has given him the chance to do. For over 20 years, Marc has been working in document forensics and he is currently a manager at the Canada Border Services Agency’s (CBSA) Laboratory and Scientific Services Directorate (LSSD) in Ottawa.

“There’s no other lab like this in Canada,” says Marc. Handwriting, counterfeit products, biological agents, DNA, fumigants and radiation and explosives detection are all just part of a regular day for the scientists at the LSSD.

Starting in the Public Service

Marc began his public service career in the early 1980s. He graduated from Ottawa University in chemistry and got his first job at the RCMP working in document forensics. He then spent ten years at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service before joining the lab at Revenue Canada in 1995.

It was around this time that Revenue Canada, seeing an increase in revenue fraud and fake IDs, was looking for help to set up a dedicated forensic service. Marc was the first document examiner hired at Revenue Canada, and the job proved to be exactly what he was looking for. In his first year there, the lab analyzed over 800 questioned documents, mostly tax and revenue records, saving the Canadian public millions of dollars.

Focuses on authenticating documents

Today the LSSD is part of the CBSA and Marc’s team focuses on authenticating documents, like tax records and identity papers. The team won a Public Service Award of Excellence in 2007 and has been recognized around the world for its methods of detecting and analyzing specific chemicals found in ink that change over time.

“It’s like walking into a room that’s just been painted,” says Marc. “You can smell the fresh paint. The same principle applies to ink on a page. By studying the evaporation rates of the ink and the amount of solvents, you can establish whether a document has been ‘freshly’ prepared. And this can determine that a record is not authentic.”

In the past 12 years, more than 60,000 documents have been examined at the LSSD. The increased focus on border security and the events of 9/11 have contributed to the demand for the lab’s services. Marc’s team may be asked to look at a whole set of documents to see if they were made by the same counterfeiter or to examine a suspicious birth certificate found by a border services officer. One way the lab can identify fraudulent documents is by finding anachronisms: if a document is supposed to be from the 1960s, it should not have been made using any technology or inks that were not available at that time.

High technology knowledge-based job

Today, documents are more and more sophisticated with imbedded security features, so Marc’s team needs complex equipment to examine them. “We’re changing our magnifying glass,” says Marc. In the past, the lab would use special microscopes to measure, for example, the thickness of the toner on a page. Now Marc and his team use computers with special filters and robotic vision to examine features that the naked eye can’t see, such as nanoprinting and heat-sensitive inks. 

From examining 800 documents in his first year to 8,000 last year, Marc has seen many changes in the lab and its scope since he began there in 1995. Scientists at the LSSD are involved in many more areas of border management and they don’t have to be right next to their equipment anymore. They can travel with portable ultraviolet and infrared light sources, microscopes and remote chemical sensors to monitor goods and assess risk. 

Security for Canadians

Knowing that his work contributes to the safety and security of Canadians is very rewarding for Marc. However, identifying fraudulent documents is just one side of the equation. Document integrity and ensuring the privacy of Canadians are equally important issues, so the lab works with other governmental organizations to help develop better security features for documents.

Marc is now developing a new area for the LSSD, the Advanced Technologies Section, to research and promote emerging technologies that have the most potential for border security applications, such as nanotechnology and data mining (which can be used to identify patterns from huge amounts of information). Marc is also looking at privacy enhancing technology to ensure, for example, that biometric information is not compromised. Being at the forefront of new technologies is what Marc likes best, and he can’t wait to see what comes next.

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