B.C. internet child exploitation unit eyes permanent funding as files pile up

The Greater Victoria Integrated Child Exploitation Team opened 142 files in 2025.

A specialized police team on southern Vancouver Island hopes to secure permanent funding to continue investigating sex crimes against children.

The Greater Victoria Integrated Child Exploitation Unit (GVICE) is supported by a $1.9 million federal grant, which expires in March of 2027.

The team is laying the groundwork to secure long-term funding well before the money runs out.

“We’re dealing with real victims, real children here in Victoria and Saanich, so it’s imperative the funding for this is continued,” GVICE investigator Const. John Gadsby told CTV News.

The team of five police officers and one disclosure clerk is staffed by members of the Victoria, Saanich, and Central Saanich police departments.

They investigate child exploitation, including sextortion, luring, and the creation and distribution of sexual abuse material.

“It could affect (victims) for their entire lifetime,” said Central Saanich Police Service Deputy Chief Kevin Hackett, the monitoring officer for GVICE.

“Getting them out of this so they can’t be victimized again will have a positive impact on their lives downstream and may help with mental health issues in the future that could arise.”

Investigators are asking local police boards to help advocate for future funding.

“It’s much easier to get funding when there’s yellow tape … strewn around a parking lot after a brazen daylight shooting,” Hackett said.

The unit got up and running in April of 2024, following a six-month pilot project in 2021.

During that time, the team has seized more than half a million pictures and videos of child sexual abuse.

“That’s 500,000 images and videos taken from Victoria (and) Saanich residents, which is a crazy number and it’s only going to increase,” Gadsby said.

‘A small dent in the scale of the problem’

The unit opened 142 files in 2025. Of those, roughly 15 have been referred to Crown prosecutors for charge consideration.

“The work that we do is extremely hard; the investigations are complex. They require multiple judicial authorizations, which can take a number of hours to complete,” Gadsby said.

“(Having) double the amount of staff would be fantastic. We’d be able to get through a lot more files.”

A national child protection agency said policing online abuse is undeniably important, but it won’t solve the problem.

“The rate at which reports come in to police or even to us outpaces the rate at which we or police or anyone else can respond to the problem,” said Jacques Marcoux, research and analytics director for the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (CCCP).

“You could double or even triple the (policing) capacity and it would still only make a small dent in the scale of the problem.”

CCCP operates Cybertip, which is a national tipline for reporting online child sexual abuse and exploitation. It gets roughly 20,000 reports a year, Marcoux said.

Getting to the root of the issue will require stricter regulations for social media companies, he said.

In early December, Australia enacted legislation that bans children under 16 from popular social media platforms. Enforcing the law falls on tech companies, which must remove the accounts of users under 16 or be fined up to $45.5 million CAD.

“Right now, there are no laws in Canada that impose any sort of duty of care or responsibility onto these platforms,” Marcoux said.

He hopes the federal government will introduce legislation similar to the Online Harms Act, a bill that failed to become law before the spring election. It would have imposed legal obligations on social media platforms to mitigate risks for users.

In November, Justice Minister Sean Fraser told reporters, “components of that bill are finding their way into other pieces of legislation, but I wouldn’t expect it to be copied and pasted in substantially the same form.”

To report online child sexual abuse and exploitation, go to cybertip.ca. If you know of a child in immediate danger, call your local police department.