This atlas spent eight ledgers recording what Canadian police technology can do, and never once recorded whether anyone checks who used it. The ninth, Toronto, is the first that answers — for one system, and only half of the question. Five of the six provinces represented here already require a police service to report a privacy breach. Not one of them requires it to go looking for one.
11 sourced records8 capability states5 of 6 provinces with a duty in force
Every system is registered. Nobody registers the watching.
Before this finding, the register carried 72 capability states across eight jurisdictions. Auditing appeared in six of those rows — never as the capability under test, only as an attribute of something else: a vendor's "audit controls", a platform's "auditability", or a record that was not obtained. The question of whether a human being reviews who ran a search had no row, so it had no answer.
THE DUTY, AS ENACTEDReporting
Breach occurs→Somebody notices→Duty to report
Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta all require a police service to notify affected people and a regulator once a breach meets a harm threshold. Every one of those duties begins at the middle step, and no statute examined here requires that step to happen.
The systems in this atlas write access logs; that is what "auditability" in a capability row means. A log that is written and never read is indistinguishable, from the outside, from no log at all. No obtained record establishes that any of the eight services routinely reviews one.
In Ontario, a province with no ledger in this atlas, a judge has found there is no evidence anyone was suspicious of a series of off-duty database queries until a gunman arrived at the home address one of them returned. The detection mechanism was an attempted murder investigation.
The timeline is not of purchases but of obligations: when each province required a police service to say something, and what it still does not require anyone to do.
Capability register
The national row the ledgers were missing
The same evidence states the city ledgers use, applied to the act of watching rather than to a machine.