Ghazal Azizi Kashi, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Investigative Journalism Foundation

Almost all major police departments across the country have contracts for high-tech surveillance and digital products made by Axon, according to public records. Critics warn the American company’s dominance is introducing new threats to Canadians’ civil liberties, but police are welcoming Axon’s controversial technologies with open arms. 

An investigation by the IJF has found that at least 17 municipal police departments, three of five provincial police forces, as well as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are using Axon’s software or surveillance tech.

Based in Arizona, Axon has become a go-to supplier among Canadian police forces for products ranging from body-worn cameras to AI-based report-writing software and automated licence plate readers. The company is testing facial recognition in Canada, a controversial technology that has been banned in some parts of the world.  

Axon is also a familiar name to civil liberties experts who warn of the militarization of police.

“A tech company that does surveillance tech, the first people that they are beholden to are their investors,” said David Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights non-profit in San Francisco. “Members of the public are at the bottom of the concern.”

‘A One-Stop Shop’

Axon designs its products to connect and communicate with each other, but critics liken Axon’s ecosystem to a ‘complete surveillance package.‘

Like most tech firms, Axon designs its products to be synced with one another. What police departments gain in convenience, however, citizens may be losing in civil liberties, critics warn. 

It’s possible to trigger an Axon body-worn camera to start recording after a police officer deploys their Axon taser gun, and for Axon’s AI-powered software to prepare an incident report based on the camera’s audio recording. 

This compatibility feature, which police departments have said is a major selling point, makes it difficult for agencies to opt for competitor suppliers.

British Columbia’s police information management organization PRIMECorp selected Axon in 2021 as its main software supplier. PRIMECorp’s chief operating officer, Wayne Plamondon, said in a press release that his office was “confident” in Axon “as a common platform amongst the B.C police agencies now and into the future.”

The director of privacy, surveillance and technology program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), Tamir Israel, described Axon as a “one-stop shop.” 

The company has been marketing a “complete surveillance package” to police, masking the products’ human rights, civil liberties and privacy trade-offs under the guise of transparency and efficiency, Israel said. 

Chris Schneider, a Brandon University professor of sociology who specializes in police tech, cautioned that companies like Axon have been capitalizing on public anger around police violence and police killings to push their technologies in the name of accountability. 

“Axon saw the writing on the wall early,” he said. 

The company rebranded from Taser to Axon in 2017, and in the same year, offered all police agencies in Canada and the U.S. free body-worn cameras and digital evidence management software for a year. 

“You get used to the technology, you get used to the software, become comfortable with it once you’ve had it for a year, and now Axon’s like ‘Hey, you’re gonna pony up,’” Schneider explained. 

Since 2021, Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) has been contracting Axon for its digital evidence management software. To keep up with other police departments and easily exchange information across agencies, all major municipal police forces in the province also use Axon Evidence. 

In 2024, Axon won a four-year contract worth $32.6 million to supply the OPP’s body-worn cameras. Compatibility with OPP’s software was a requirement in the bidding process. 

Cut the cameras

At least 16 municipal police departments in Canada use Axon’s body-worn cameras.

Three municipal police forces that haven’t announced ongoing contracts for Axon’s surveillance technology have previously run or are currently running a pilot program for body-worn cameras: Winnipeg, Abbotsford, B.C., and Montreal. 

Axon is supplying Winnipeg Police Service’s ongoing pilot run of body-worn cameras, free of charge. The pilot is expected to end by the start of 2027, and if successful, the initial roll-out of body-worn cameras is estimated to cost between $1 million and $2 million. 

Abbotsford Police Department is currently reviewing the results of its 2025 program, which ended in December. One of the earliest forces to test body-worn cameras, Montreal police concluded in 2019 that the program yielded inconsistent results and was too costly. Now, a racism scandal involving some officers keeping Black citizens’ hair as trophies has pushed the city to reconsider. The city of Montreal plans to equip 3,500 officers with body-worn cameras within the next year.   

While Israel understands the pitch for body-worn cameras, he is critical of how they are implemented. He said for the cameras to act as an accountability tool, an independent third-party must have control of the footage, but that’s not the practice in Canada. 

“We’re now seeing [body-worn cameras] increasingly being used as more of a surveillance tool,” Israel told the IJF. 

In Edmonton, Axon is running the first pilot program in the world to combine live facial recognition with its body-worn cameras. 

Last December, Edmonton Police Service (EPS) announced it is testing a new technology to identify “high-risk offenders,” using an AI model that has been trained to detect the faces of 7,000 people on a watchlist. A CBC investigation in April found that the artificial intelligence powering the project is supplied by private Israeli firm Corsight AI, whose technology the Israeli military uses for mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza. 

Outside Canada, many jurisdictions have banned or restricted these controversial technologies. 

Since February 2025, the European Parliament’s AI Act has banned systems that scrape images from the internet or CCTV footage to build facial recognition databases, as well as AI models that carry out real-time biometric identification in public spaces for law enforcement.

A website tracking use of facial recognition technologies in the U.S. has identified at least 25 jurisdictions that have passed bills prohibiting use of facial recognition.

The RCMP’s website says it now forbids the use of body-worn video for biometric analysis including facial recognition. In 2021, Canada’s privacy commissioner said the Mounties’ use of Clearview.AI, a facial recognition software, violated privacy laws, following a lawsuit against the national policing body and the U.S. based tech company. 

No specific legislation targeting facial recognition technology has been passed in Canada so far.

In addition to privacy concerns, Tamir Israel is worried about racial bias and AI exacerbating police use of force. The data used to train AI models is known to be biased, and facial recognition technologies are documented to have a higher false positive rate for racialized people, Israel said. 

“If you get a false positive and a police officer is being told by this technology that a person four metres away from them is suspected of something violent and maybe armed, this could devolve very quickly,” Israel warned. 

Under phase one of the EPS pilot, the police would not be alerted in real time if a person nearby matches the profile of a suspect. In phase two of the assessment, however, front-line officers are notified when a potential match is in close proximity. The EPS did not respond to the IJF’s email, and it is unclear which stage of the pilot is currently unfolding. 

Axon did not respond to any of the IJF’s requests for comment about this story, including questions about the civil liberties concerns raised by critics.  

Where you go, cameras can follow

Automated licence plate readers threaten privacy rights, critics say.

The IJF’s analysis shows that at least 12 municipal police departments across Canada and the OPP are using Axon’s automated licence plate recognition systems. 

The AI-powered licence plate readers pair video analytics software with cameras mounted to police vehicles or other CCTV equipment to track and identify drivers.

A 2020 report from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab warned that technologies like facial recognition or automated licence plate readers acutely endanger citizen’s rights to privacy and freedom of expression. 

“That is a very egregious shift from the constitutional safeguard that police can’t just randomly ask people for their identification,” Israel said of both the EPS facial recognition program and automated licence plate readers.

“We shouldn’t be so gung-ho about putting yet another really powerful surveillance tool in the hands of the police without having the appropriate checks and safeguards in place,” he warned. 

Draft #Unknown

Axon’s Draft One, a software that uses AI to produce police reports, is yet another source of unease for critics. 

“Police officers spend more than 40 per cent of their time writing police reports,” reads Axon’s website page introducing Draft One. “What if you could cut that time in half with the click of a button?”

The Mounties have signed up to find out.

In April, the National Post reported that the RCMP had quietly begun a year-long trial of Draft One across eight detachments in Alberta and British Columbia. The pilot, which comes with a $200,000 price tag, began in July 2025, but was first openly mentioned in the RCMP’s 2026-2027 Departmental Plan published this April. 

Draft One uploads footage from police officers’ Axon body-worn cameras to its cloud software and drafts a report based on the recordings and input from the officer. 

The AI model integrated in Draft One is Open-AI’s GPT-4 Turbo model, which Axon says “has been instructed to stick to the facts.” Still, the RCMP requires that police change at least 10 per cent of Draft One reports to ensure human oversight. 

Legal experts and police-tech researchers are concerned about potentially false, misleading or misinterpreted information produced by AI models. 

Since police reports are go-to documents in court, inaccuracies may have severe legal implications and demand extra time and resources further down the line in the justice system, Israel said. 

A 2025 investigation by the EFF found that it’s impossible to distinguish which parts of a Draft One police report were AI-generated and which were written by police. 

Draft One seems “deliberately designed to avoid audits that could provide any accountability to the public,” reads EFF’s report.

The IJF reached out to Axon to inquire if its policies and practices have changed since, but did not receive a response. 

Jessica Kingsbury, director of media relations at the RCMP, emphasized that Draft One “does not replace officers’ professional judgment.” She added that the national policing force had implemented safeguards to ensure officers review and edit their reports. 

“Regardless of whether Draft One is used, police officers remain responsible for the content of their reports,” Kingsbury wrote in a statement to the IJF. “Report narratives must be supported by officers’ notes, and body-worn camera recordings remain available for review and disclosure within the judicial process.”

The RCMP’s trial of Draft One ended in August, and the results have yet to be released. 

Patient Zero

The Axon Training Pod “enables agencies to rapidly deploy frequent, high-quality VR training,” the company’s webpage reads.

Axon puts a lot of resources into advertising to Canadian police.

In August, the company sponsored the Canadian Association of Police Governance’s annual conference in Edmonton. Axon is also a named partner of the Association of Police Directors of Quebec, along with other security-tech firms like Motorola and Forrest Green. 

“[Police] are always pushing public safety in the messaging of all these technologies,” EFF’s David Maass said. “A lot of that is coming from the vendors …. because they all have a financial stake in this.”

Apprehensive of the research that these companies cite in sales pitches, critics told the IJF they are alarmed by police enthusiasm for new products.

“One kind of tool is presented and increasingly additional surveillance mechanisms are layered on top of that and police are encouraged to adopt them,” Israel said.

If a police officer is in trouble, they can tap their Axon body-worn camera three times to automatically deploy a drone to their exact location, VPD says.

In June, the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) became Canada’s first agency to buy Axon’s Skydio X10 drones to “support officers with aerial awareness.”

“The potential of the Skydio drone systems in our work is impressive for many reasons, not least of which is they will be able to link with our body-worn cameras,” said VPD Inspector Wade Rodrigue in a press release.

VPD has also partnered with Axon to train officers using virtual reality systems that allow up to five cops at once to run scenarios in soundproof, climate-controlled pods.    

As the Axon logo now flies in the Canadian sky, Chris Schneider questioned the seemingly unstoppable dollars the American company has been cashing in. 

“It’s called Axon Public Safety Canada so that might be misleading to some,” he said. “Do Canadians really want to invest in more American companies? I think it is an important question that we should be raising with taxpayers in this contemporary political context.”

Methodology Note: The top 25 Canadian cities in the IJF’s analysis were chosen based on Statistics Canada’s 2025 population estimates for census metropolitan areas. Kelowna, B.C., and Moncton, N.B., were excluded from the list of top 25 cities given regional divisions of the RCMP police in these areas. The same goes for St. John’s, where the provincial police force, Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, operates. In lieu of these cities, Ontario’s Greater Sudbury, Kingston and Guelph metropolitan areas were included as top 25 cities. The police departments analyzed for each metropolitan area were the ones administered by the representative city. For instance, Surrey, B.C., has its own municipal police force, Surrey Police Service. However, the city falls under the Vancouver census metropolitan area, so the IJF looked into the Vancouver Police Department’s connections to Axon instead. To determine whether a major police agency contracted Axon’s surveillance and digital technologies, the IJF reviewed police department websites, Axon’s press releases and news reports.  The IJF surveyed public records for three common Axon products: Evidence.com, body cameras and in-car video systems.

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