Canada

Flock Safety has told reporters that it has no partnerships with Canadian municipalities, law enforcement agencies, or airports. Treat sightings of "Flock cameras" in Canada with scepticism until an agency confirms it.

Plate readers themselves are another matter. They have been in use for years and are expanding, supplied by other vendors, with far less public documentation than their American equivalents.

What is actually deployed

The visible pattern is a mix of vehicle-mounted readers on patrol cars and fixed units at selected locations. Toronto Police began rolling out Axon plate readers on cruisers in 2023 and now has front-facing units on hundreds of cars, along with a small number of fixed Genetec cameras. Several Ontario services including Hamilton, Peel, York, Waterloo, Sudbury, and the Ontario Provincial Police operate the technology in vehicles or on roadways, and municipalities have folded readers into expanded CCTV programmes.

Two features of the Canadian picture matter for research. Deployment is fragmented across vendors and agencies rather than consolidated in one national network, so there is no single audit artifact to request. And retention rules vary widely between jurisdictions, with reported periods ranging from 72 hours to a full month, which means the retention question has a real answer worth getting in writing for your own area.

Where they are mapped

Panopti.ca is the Canadian counterpart to DeFlock, started in 2025, with several hundred cameras plotted so far and most of them in Ontario. Coverage is early, which means contributions are unusually valuable right now.

DeFlock renders from OpenStreetMap, so Canadian cameras tagged in OpenStreetMap appear there too. The tagging scheme is international. Adding a camera in Canada uses the same tags as adding one in Ohio, and it improves every map built on that data.

Which law applies

Getting records depends on identifying the right level of government, because Canada has no single access statute:

• Federal bodies, including the RCMP, fall under the Access to Information Act, with privacy questions under the Privacy Act. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has jurisdiction.
• Provincial police and ministries fall under provincial access legislation, such as Ontario's FIPPA or British Columbia's FIPPA.
• Municipal police services in Ontario fall under MFIPPA, and other provinces have equivalents. This is usually the right route for a city police department.
• Provincial privacy regulators handle complaints and sometimes publish investigation reports that are more informative than anything you would get from a request. Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner is the most active on surveillance technology.

Police services boards and municipal councils meet in public and publish agendas. In practice that is where plate reader programmes are approved, expanded, and renewed, and it is a far more productive place to ask questions than a records request that takes three months.

What to ask for

Canadian requests need to be more specific than American ones, because there is no standard vendor report to name. Useful items:

• The vendor and model in use, and how many units, fixed and vehicle-mounted.
• The retention period for reads that do not match an alert, and the retention period for those that do.
• Who is authorised to query the data, whether a reason must be recorded, and whether the system produces an audit log at all. If it does not, that is itself the story.
• Any privacy impact assessment prepared before deployment.
• The policy on sharing with other agencies, and specifically with agencies outside Canada.
• Where the data is physically stored, and by whom.

Those last two are the sharpest questions available in Canada. American reporting has established that plate reader data flows between agencies far beyond the department that bought the cameras, including to federal immigration authorities with no contract of their own. A Canadian force using an American vendor with American cloud infrastructure should be able to explain precisely what prevents the same thing happening with Canadian data, and the answer belongs in public.