Juno News - November 03, 2026


RCMP to test facial recognition systems using Canadian police booking photos

Stockwell Day： Will the BC Conservatives stay united？ Canadian troops sent to Russian border

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

130.23

Word count

436

Sentence count

26


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Is the RCMP hiding something about using facial recognition technology?
00:00:05.100 I'm Melanie Bennett for Juno News.
00:00:07.180 Back in August, I uncovered plans by the RCMP to test facial recognition technology
00:00:12.920 using mugshots that they collected from Canadian police agencies.
00:00:18.040 Facial identification software can take a photograph of an unknown person
00:00:22.840 and compare their face against thousands, potentially millions, of stored images to find a match.
00:00:29.440 Now imagine police taking an image from a surveillance camera perhaps and searching
00:00:34.500 against it in a national database of mugshots. But what happens when the technology gets it
00:00:40.420 wrong? Are they using photographs of people who are maybe arrested but never convicted? And who
00:00:46.420 decides how far the police can go with this technology? And these are exactly the kinds
00:00:50.880 of questions that civil liberties advocates have been raising for a while. So I went ahead and
00:00:56.340 asked the RCMP which private companies were involved, whose mugshots were being used,
00:01:00.940 and whether Canadians who'd never been convicted of any crime could be included in the database.
00:01:06.500 I was told in a request for comment response that AI facial technology is
00:01:10.480 not currently available to the RCMP. I obtained ATIP disclosure that suggests this
00:01:16.820 may not be totally accurate. Emails from December 2025 say that the RCMP already outlined
00:01:24.700 a facial recognition research project with the Federal Privacy Commissioner's Office.
00:01:30.260 And the project has received funding from the Defence Research and Development Canada.
00:01:35.740 So the Department of National Defence, the emails say that they plan to use a copy of the mugshots
00:01:41.480 contained within the RCMP's National Repository of Criminal Records. And they want to do that to test
00:01:47.180 the algorithms from three private facial recognition vendors. The RCMP told me that
00:01:53.640 those companies would not have access to actual images. But did the police agencies supplying
00:01:58.380 these photographs know about the proposed testing? Now, I'm not sure because further ATIPS that I
00:02:03.140 received said that the RCMP couldn't locate records that notified police agencies that
00:02:09.520 booking photographs would be used for this kind of facial recognition testing. They couldn't
00:02:14.720 locate documents identifying the legal authority relied on by the RCMP for using booking photographs
00:02:20.900 either. In 2021, the Federal Privacy Commissioner found that the RCMP violated the Privacy Act
00:02:28.500 through its use of something called Clearview AI, which is a private facial recognition company.
00:02:34.540 And now, five years later, the RCMP is exploring a potential national service across the board.
00:02:40.980 And for Canadians concerned about government overreach, the stakes are significant. We deserve
00:02:45.800 transparency on how biometric information is being used. For Juno News, I'm Melanie Bennett.
00:02:50.900 Thank you.