McGill regularly presents itself as an open and accessible campus, dedicated to offering the “best possible education” while ensuring academic freedom, equity, and inclusivity. Yet the university’s newly proposed Identification Policy for Access to Properties Owned, Occupied, or Used by the University, presented to the McGill Senate on Jan. 14, is grounded in a different premise altogether: That the university’s openness is contingent upon identification, monitoring, and the ability to regulate who inhabits its public spaces. Presented informationally to the Senate, the policy now moves directly to the Board of Governors for approval.
The proposed Identification Policy would empower “authorized personnel” to demand students, faculty, or visitors to produce McGill or government-issued identification and, if necessary, remove face-coverings for identity verification. The policy outlines several “legitimate purposes” for requesting ID: Supporting the integrity of campus or online activities, upholding university policies, ensuring the physical safety of community members, and protecting McGill property.
Although McGill frames the proposed Identification Policy as a neutral tool for campus safety, it extends discretionary surveillance powers across campus. In practice, this framework risks uneven enforcement while independently discouraging student organizing and entrenching a carceral approach to campus governance.
Sponsored by Vice-President Administration and Finance Fabrice Labeau, the policy was framed as a measure to codify existing practices of identity verification and surveillance that have been occurring without a basis in explicit policy. Framing the policy as a mere formalization not only exposes that surveillance practices have been operating without formal authorization and policy grounding, but also trivializes the devastating consequences the policy would have if approved.
Unlike exam invigilation, where identification serves a clear and narrow function as an administrative safeguard, the security-related justifications identified under the policy as ‘legitimate purposes’ are vague and become a coercive demand in public campus life.
The policy offers no criteria for determining necessity, no requirement that requests be expressly justified at the time they are made, and no immediate mechanism for challenge. Instead, it concentrates discretion in the hands of the individual enforcing it—an arrangement that directly violates McGill’s own commitments to equality and due process.
The most consequential provision of the proposed policy is its authorization to demand the removal of a mask or face covering. This marks a shift in how presence on campus is regulated. Identification is no longer limited to confirming who someone is in a specific context, such as an exam, but extends to making individuals visibly identifiable in public university spaces.
Mask removal changes the stakes of identification; once a face is revealed, anonymity is lost beyond the immediate interaction. For protestors, this risk is particularly acute, as anonymity often functions as a basic safeguard against retaliation, doxxing, or disciplinary targeting. The policy offers no guidance on how such risks are to be mitigated, nor does it account for how compelled visibility reshapes who feels safe participating in on-campus organizing.
Although the policy includes provisions for religious accommodation—such as allowing identification in a private space or before a person of a particular gender—these measures do not prevent harm. Instead, they shift the burden onto the individual being stopped, who must submit to additional scrutiny to justify their presence on campus. In doing so, the policy treats masking as a problem to be managed rather than a practice grounded in health, safety, or religious reasons. In Quebec, provincial legislative acts such as Bill 21 and Bill 9 have repeatedly targeted Muslim people—particularly Muslim women—to sustain scrutiny over religious visibility and practice. In this context, discretionary enforcement of face-covering rules cannot be treated as neutral and is closely intertwined with the broader Islamophobic discrimination that is disguised as secularism.
This burden is amplified by the policy’s lack of meaningful oversight. While McGill states that “authorized personnel” will be adequately trained to know when it is appropriate or lawful to request identification, the proposed policy provides no mechanism for verifying whether a request was legitimate at the moment it was made. This lack of clarity is compounded by the broad range of individuals who qualify as “authorized personnel.” Campus security officers—often employed through third-party contractors—are granted the same discretionary authority as exam invigilators and faculty acting in official capacities, without equivalent standards of transparency or accountability. Further, where students may be required to identify themselves on demand, “authorized personnel” are not required to provide identification in return. In practice, the policy concentrates enforcement power in such “authorized personnel.”
If McGill wishes to maintain credibility as an “open and accessible campus,” the minimum conditions are evident: Those empowered to demand identification must themselves be clearly identifiable, face-covering removal should not be treated as a routine enforcement tool, and policies governing protest must not hinge on discretionary interpretations made in the moment.
An open campus does not treat anonymity as a threat. Until McGill reconciles that contradiction, this policy acts as a mechanism of control, not of safety.
