In June 2025, the Government of Canada ordered Hikvision Canada to wind up and cease its Canadian operations — the end of one of the most widely installed camera brands in the country. Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses, plenty of them in Greater Victoria, now own equipment whose Canadian support future is uncertain. This page lays out what actually happened, what it does and doesn't mean for a system already on your wall, how to work out whether you even have Hikvision gear (many people don't know), and the practical paths to replacement — most of which reuse the cabling you already paid for.
Get a Free QuoteFollowing a national-security review under the Investment Canada Act, the Government of Canada ordered Hikvision Canada in June 2025 to wind up and cease its Canadian operations within 120 days. In the same announcement, federal departments and agencies were barred from purchasing or using Hikvision products. This wasn't a tariff dispute or a paperwork issue — it was a formal wind-up order aimed at the company's Canadian business itself.
Hikvision challenged the order in court, seeking to stay it while the case was argued. That challenge was dismissed in September 2025, and the wind-up proceeded. The practical result: Hikvision no longer has a Canadian corporate presence to stand behind the equipment it sold here. None of this makes it illegal for a private homeowner or business to keep using cameras already installed — but it changes what those cameras can expect in support.
Your existing cameras will keep recording — nothing switches off because of the order. The uncertainty is about everything around them. Warranty claims that would have gone through a Canadian entity no longer have one to go through. Firmware updates — the patches that fix security vulnerabilities in the cameras themselves — have no guaranteed Canadian distribution path. Replacement parts and like-for-like swaps get harder as Canadian distributor stock runs down.
We'd frame it as practical risk rather than emergency. A camera system is a long-lived asset; part of what you bought was a support future, and that future is now unclear. For a home system watching a driveway, that may be a reason to plan replacement over a year or two rather than panic. For a business relying on footage as evidence, or a strata responsible to owners, an unsupported and unpatchable system is a harder thing to defend — and worth moving on sooner. This is practical guidance, not legal advice; organizations with compliance questions should ask their own advisors.
Plenty of people own Hikvision without knowing it. The brand was one of the world's largest OEM manufacturers, and its hardware was sold in Canada under many other labels — installer house brands, online kit brands, and rebadged recorder lines. The name on the camera is not reliable evidence either way.
A basic audit: check the label on the recorder and on a camera or two for the manufacturer name and model number. Check which app you use to view the system — Hik-Connect and iVMS are Hikvision's. Look up the model numbers if the branding is generic. If you're not sure, a local installer can identify a system in a single site visit and tell you plainly what it is, how old it is, and what condition the cabling is in — which matters enormously for what replacement costs.
The expensive part of most camera installations is not the cameras — it's the cabling: the runs through walls and attics that took the labour. Modern IP cameras from essentially every professional brand run over the same network cable, so a Hikvision replacement usually means new cameras and a new recorder on your existing wiring. Older analog Hikvision systems over coax have upgrade paths too, either using converters or by re-pulling cable — and in Victoria's wood-frame homes, re-pulling is far less disruptive than it sounds.
Replacement can also be staged. Swap the recorder and the most important cameras first — entries, tills, parkade gates — and rotate the rest through as budget allows, provided the new platform is chosen with that migration in mind. A good replacement plan starts with an honest audit of what's worth keeping (often the cabling, sometimes the mounts and housings, occasionally nothing) rather than a reflexive rip-and-replace.
The mainstream professional alternatives sold and supported in Canada fall into recognizable tiers. At the enterprise end sits Avigilon — born in British Columbia, now part of Motorola Solutions, and a natural fit for businesses and stratas that want a platform with deep Canadian roots. The established European, Korean and Japanese professional lines — Axis, Bosch, Hanwha and i-PRO among them — cover everything from single-storefront systems to large multi-site deployments, with long track records and proper Canadian distribution.
For homes, those same professional lines scale down well, and Canada's alarm-heritage brands round out the picture on the intrusion side. The honest summary: losing Hikvision removes the cheapest tier of the market, not the best of it. The brands remaining are, on the whole, the ones professional installers preferred anyway — and the right choice depends on your building and your priorities, which is a design conversation, not a brand loyalty one.
Tell us about your property and we'll come back with practical options and honest pricing.