The emotion was palpable this Sunday afternoon in Ottawa as the 46th Fallen in Action Police Officers' Memorial Ceremony was held on Parliament Hill.

Several hundred police officers from across Canada and the United States gathered to remember their fallen colleagues. In the past year, 12 officers have surrendered their weapons.

Among the speakers at this moving ceremony was Frédéric Serre, spokesman for the Association des membres de la police Montée du Québec and member of the ceremony's founding committee.

"The first ceremony was held in 1977, to pay tribute to a police officer who died in Ottawa. It wasn't until 1995 that the event became national," he explained to Néomédia on the sidelines of the ceremony.

As in the past, the imposing police procession strolled down Wellington Street from the Supreme Court of Canada to Parliament Hill, where the monument to fallen police officers stands.  "We had police officers from the Vaudreuil-Soulanges region, Montreal, Laval, Longueuil, Ontario, members of the RCMP, the SQ and even the United States," he adds.

Quebec salutes Maureen Breau

In keeping with tradition, the names of all police officers who have died in service since the late 1800s were called out, to honour their memory. The kepi of those who died during the year was then carried on a cushion.

As moving as ever, the September 24 commemoration was even more so, as the name of Maureen Breau, the policewoman who died in Trois-Rivières last March, was sadly echoed. 

Closer to home, the names of Sébastien Coghlan-Goyette and Sophia Rigas, both killed on Route 340 in Les Cèdres on November 14, 2010, cannot be overlooked.

The officer and his colleague, a trainee at the time, died in their patrol car after colliding with a deer en route to Saint-Lazare, where they were responding to a call about a family dispute.