From traffic cop to double agent: Quebec’s first female police officer reflects on career in biography

Nicole Juteau was about 14 years old when she decided she wanted to be a police officer.

Living in Montreal near a busy road, Juteau would often watch officers stop cars. It always left her eager to find out why.

“That’s why I wanted to help people,” she recounted. “I wanted to do the job, and I wanted to know everything about the incident.”

But the journey to becoming Quebec’s first female police officer was filled with obstacles.

That story – and tales from her 25 years on the job – are relayed in a new biography by author Annie Roy: “La téméraire: Nicole Juteau, de première policière au Québec à agente double.”

“You must read this book because this is my story,” Juteau told CityNews.

Juteau’s childhood dream of joining a police force hit a first roadblock in the 1970s when she began college. She was unable to apply to her school’s police technology program because women not admitted at the time.

Similar courses were offered at the school’s correctional technology program, so she enrolled there. Then she switched into the police technology program through a counsellor who was unfamiliar with the policies.

Hired by SQ in 1975

She faced challenges, but was eventually hired by the Sûreté du Québec in June 1975.

“When I made the traffic control, I stopped the traffic. Because everybody stopped to look at me because I’m a woman. They never saw a woman before. Some ladies they stopped the car, they got out of the car and they came to shake me hand. ‘Oh, good, good, a woman.’

“A lot of cops, they said, ‘oh, my goodness.’ They realized how hard it was to do my job.”

She went from patroller, to double agent, and finally retired as an investigator in 2001 after 25 years of service.

Juteau says she could write a police report but not her own book, so she was thankful when Roy heard her story and decided to share it.

“It’s a biography but it’s not boring, it’s not drab,” said Roy. “It’s a biography that is the image of Nicole, so it’s bursting, there are dialogues, we really enter into her world. It reads like a novel.”

‘She has opened doors’

Stories from not having a uniform for a woman officer to adventures she’s had on the job, Roy describes Juteau as a pioneer.

“She has opened doors, a long way, but women still have more to open,” said the author. “I think that this book allows precisely to continue the reflection but also to have a good moment of reading, to have fun.”

Juteau’s advice to women who want to become a police officer like her: just be yourself.

“If you want to do a job, you want to do anything in the world, you can do it because I did it,” she said. “Nobody was there before me and now I’m the first one. But now the road is really easy. More easy for women. And I’m so happy for that.”