Global Surveillance State Comes to Canada
Before we can discuss the state of Canada now, we have to first go back to when surveillance and government control in Canada first began its rapid increase
Global Surveillance State Comes to Canada
For years Canadians have warned about increasing government and surveillance, but beginning in 2020, with the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian government dramatically ramped up its authority.
New regulations made it far more difficult to travel the country and it required a sweeping vaccine mandate. Worse still, citizens’ status were checked with a digital vaccine passport also known as a digital ID called VaxiCode. Due to various controversies and internal corruption, VaxiCode is no longer functioning. But many still believe it was a test by the government to see how far their control reached.
In 2022, these criticisms culminated in a massive protest where hundreds of Truckers from across the country rallied at Parliament Hill in Canada. The protest soon became known as the Freedom Convoy, but instead of listening to the complaints of the citizens, the government doubled down and responded with the police.
Since then, the Canadian government has realized just how much control they have. And even worse — They’ve begun integrating American surveillance tech.
Canada’s Camera State
As a United States citizen, I am often traveling back and forth between the US and Canada, on my most recent journey through the Toronto airport I witnessed something straight out of a movie.
As I passed customs I walked past a camera and it instantly identified me and flashed my name on the screen. I didn’t have to present my documents or speak to anyone, it was purely facial recognition. Despite being in Toronto, US customs is technically US territory, but this got me curious:
Were there any other examples of American surveillance reaching Canada?
Sure enough, the US company Flock Safety, has deployed 642 surveillance cameras on Canadian streets. Flock cameras have become notorious in the United States due to their massive expansion and abuses by local police departments. For instance, one Georgia police chief used Flock’s system to stalk his ex-gf who he searched more than 600 times.
isn’t the only one of these tech companies running the vehicle detection and identification circuit however. Canada has its very own partners in the global surveillance state.
For instance, walking down a single block of the Montréal major street Rue-Saint Denis, you will see at least three flock-style cameras.
This one was openly labeled as the Miovision 3, a camera which is supposedly used to track vehicles in order to integrate the data in traffic solutions
Based out of Kitchener, Ontario, the company Miovision has established a global base of 5,000 customers across 68 different countries. According to their own press release, this large amount of data “has detected more than 77 billion vehicles and 3 billion pedestrians and cyclists.”
The company currently uses a low resolution edit which can’t detect faces in order to comply with privacy laws, but in theory they could just stop doing this— and without changing the cameras, begin recording 4k quality footage of all of our faces and movements.
We witnessed something similar in the United Kingdom: a few thousand cameras turned into a million CCTV cameras across just the city of London. We’ve witnessed the same thing in the United States. When I first started writing this article 8 days ago there were 128,000 cameras in the US, now just one day and one week later it has already increased by 5,000 cameras.
Global Surveillance State Comes to Canada
It could happen to Canada too, but there’s also still a chance to stop it, we stand on the precipice. Miovision 3 has recently begun integrating AI in their process…
Other Canadian-American Surveillance Infrastructure
While the rise of these cameras both in Canada and to the south are alarming, without a way to store and integrate the surveillance data they are gathering, they are effectively useless.
Here’s where an unfortunate pattern begins to emerge. As the cameras were going up, so too were massive new data center campuses. Canada currently has roughly 300 active data centers. The country plans to build at least 90 large scale campuses including for American company Meta.
So Canada has the physical infrastructure to collect gigawatts of data on their citizens and store that data, but what are they actually doing with it?
This is possibly the scariest factor of all Silicon Valley software company Palantir Technologies has expanded its presence in Canada.
Top Association: Golden Dome
Into Palantir’s Warp Speed platform. This collaboration enables customers to identify and address supply chain vulnerabilities in real time by manufacturing critical parts on demand, leveraging AI-driven design, additive manufacturing, and robotic assembly.
Palantir is a company which made surveillance and data integration the core of their business model. And makes it a habit to purchase data on regular citizens, including Canadian citizens.
They have been steadily expanding their reach to include several Canadian companies and even formed a recent $7.4 million with Canada’s Department of National Defense.
While the rise in invasive cameras and the data centers to sustain them are already concerning, it’s Palantir which brings it all together. They have the keys to spy on every Canadian citizen, converting their daily lives into simple data points to be manipulated.
Even if they aren’t using this technology to spy on us right now, it would be silly to assume it’s never going to happen.
Canada, you have a choice to make… otherwise you will wake up one day to find out the choice has been made for you!
