Cases involving missing children in Quebec rose last year, with runaways accounting for the overwhelming majority of disappearances and one front-line expert calling the numbers “alarming.”
The RCMP’s findings show 7,398 reported cases of missing children across the province in 2025, up 745 from the previous year.
“We’re talking about an average of 20 children who go missing every day. These numbers are alarming because they increase every year,” Réseau Enfants-Retour director general Mélanie Aubut said in a recent interview with The Gazette.
The RCMP’s statistics include a list of probable causes behind disappearances, including different kinds of abductions, accidents, wandering off, human trafficking, unknown reasons and runaways.
The vast majority — 85 per cent — of the nearly 7,400 cases reported in Quebec last year were runaways, Aubut said. Teens age 14 to 17 make up 80 per cent of runaways, she noted.
“The good thing about runaways is that usually the children are found within 48 hours to a week,” Aubut said. “But the problem is that once our young people have run away once, they run away several times. That’s really the problem, because they become vulnerable. And that’s when they get recruited into sex-trafficking rings, into organized-crime networks.
“Then it becomes a very, very big problem for our young people.”
On a Canada-wide scale, the report shows there were 34,189 reported missing children’s cases in 2025. Sgt. Annie Delisle with the RCMP’s National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains said the increase in missing children’s cases across the country is roughly four per cent from 2024.
“To us, it’s kind of a regular margin. There are fluctuations from year to year,” she said.
Runaways accounted for 24,050 missing children’s cases in Canada last year. They have “always been the majority” of disappearances, Delisle said, adding the RCMP “take it very seriously.”
“Those kids are very vulnerable when they’re on the run,” she said. “The sooner we find them, the better.”
Numbers ‘constantly increasing’ in Montreal since 2022
Montreal police Cmdr. Josée Deslongchamps of the department’s Équipe dédiée aux disparitions, aux recherches de famille et aux enlèvements parentaux (EDRE) said 2,138 cases were opened in 2025 involving disappearances and runaways of minors. (This number doesn’t include parental abductions, which is accounted for in a separate category, she said.)
“There was a decrease in 2020-2021,” she said, which is when there were social distancing measures in effect during the COVID pandemic.
“But we see that reports of missing children are constantly increasing since 2022.”
The number of cases in 2025 marks a roughly 45 per cent increase over the last four years in Montreal, Deslongchamps said. It’s also a 16 per cent jump from 2024’s total of 1,833 cases.
The strategy to locate missing children takes into account the child’s age, health, what’s behind the disappearance and other factors. These could include criminal elements or inclement weather, for example.
While these disappearances are from home, as well as a few cases from health-care facilities, “the dominant category is really runaways from youth centres,” Deslongchamps said.
Nearly 54 per cent (1,153 cases) in 2025 involved youth centres. That’s up 50 per cent from 2021, she said. The SPVM’s statistics also show that runaways from youth centres made up the bulk of cases in 2018 and 2019.
“You have to understand that often they’re placed against their will. They’re not in youth centres voluntarily,” Deslongchamps said.
Police may also be contacted when a minor who was allowed to leave on the weekend fails to return to the centre by a set time.
In Montreal, runaways are “a phenomenon that has always been” present. The reasons behind the act are “really multi-factorial,” Deslongchamps said.
Aubut said young people are “experiencing very difficult situations these days, both online and in their personal lives.”
“We’re talking about psychological distress, bullying, family conflicts and feelings of inadequacy,” she said. “And all of this can lead a child to run away.”
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Don’t wait to call
When it comes to missing kids, police stress the importance of not waiting to contact authorities.
“As soon as someone reports a disappearance or a runaway, from the moment there’s a call at 911 it will be treated as a priority,” Deslongchamps said. “Nothing is left to chance. Everything starts there.”
Delisle of the RCMP said she knows some people think they must “wait 24 hours to report somebody missing, but it’s a myth.”
“As soon as possible is best, especially when it comes to a child,” she said. “Every second counts when they go missing.”
The biggest challenges when it comes to a missing child include delays in obtaining crucial information, according to Deslongchamps. It’s important for parents to know their kids’ friends, lifestyle and acquaintances because those are exactly the kind of details police will ask about.
Another hurdle can be the complexity of searches themselves.
The Montreal police have a new team specializing in ground searches (which can be a challenge simply because of size) and helps build a profile of a missing person and their possible location. New techniques like this can help optimize searches when “time is super important,” Deslongchamps said.
Réseau Enfants-Retour director general Mélanie Aubut says young people are coping with “psychological distress, bullying, family conflicts and feelings of inadequacy. And all of this can lead a child to run away.” John Mahoney / Montreal Gazette
Prevention and intervention
Réseau Enfants-Retour has a prevention program in schools across Quebec. This helps “to equip our youth to know their limits, to know who the trusted adults are, and how they can say no,” Aubut said.
Teens and children can also reach out to the network directly if home isn’t a safe space or they don’t know where to turn and need assistance.
“We’ll help guide you toward the right resources,” Aubut said.
Aside from online resources for parents and other adults, she also encourages the public to actively share the network’s social media posts of missing children “because that’s how we’ll be able to find them.”
Robyn Dalton, executive director at Project Love, which works in schools across Montreal through different programs to help teens and young adults build emotional intelligence, said the demand for the organization’s services is on the rise.
A small change that the community at large can make to help vulnerable youth? Remember that it’s not just parents and teachers who can make a difference in a kid’s life, she said.
“What we forget is that one of the key protective factors in the life of a young person is significant, positive adult role models who give them some attention, who give them some encouragement, who take the time to care about how their day is or what they’ve gone through,” Dalton said.