York Regional Police

York Regional Police and Peel Regional Police use an Idemia facial recognition system to compare crime scene images against a combined database of booking photographs. Potential matches are reviewed by trained facial recognition analysts before being passed to investigators. The shared York and Peel database became operational in May 2024.

This entry was previously classified on this tracker as live facial recognition, which was wrong for the same reason as the Toronto entry: this is investigative image-to-mugshot matching, not real-time scanning of people in public space.

Kate Robertson of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab has said she is not aware of any Canadian police service that in practice obtains prior judicial authorisation before using facial recognition, despite that being what she describes as the gold standard of privacy protection in criminal investigations.

Update, November 2026. York Regional Police's own page (published 2 February 2026, last modified 18 April 2026) says the service began using facial recognition in 2024 under a licence with IDEMIA, comparing images collected in an investigation, such as CCTV or doorbell footage, with the criminal booking database; matches are described as "investigative leads only", the technology "is not used for real-time surveillance", data is held in Canadian data centres, and use began "after extensive consultations with Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner and members of the public". The page says use is advanced through a partnership with Peel Regional Police and Halton Regional Police, so the shared database is no longer limited to York and Peel. Halton Regional Police's own page says it will make IDEMIA's Face Expert technology available to investigators "this fall", with an information session held on 7 October 2025, and does not confirm that it has gone live. ID Tech reported on 3 February 2025 that the Halton Police Board had approved a $1.18 million contract with IDEMIA, and on 3 July 2026 that the Ottawa Police Service Board had approved, on 22 June 2026, the service joining the facial recognition network that exchanges data with York, Peel and Halton.