This first came to my attention during a radio interview on a rather obscure station in Mississauga. But the reporter seemed to indicate that it was the P.M. at the time - oddly enough, Pierre Trudeau, who appealed strongly to the youth of that day - who may have ordered it.

If memory serves, this was around the time of the FLQ nightmare in Quebec and the anti-Vietnam War movement in both Canada and the U.S., so there was a lot of fear of "radicals." The guy being interviewed noted "if you went to a concert during that time, it's very possibly your picture is somewhere in that file." 

I find that mind boggling! 

Ok, thanks for the additional info from the radio interview. I didn't really want to get political, but what I was wondering about was whether the Trudeau government would have authorized something of this nature. But as you say, there was a lot of fear of "radicals" at the time, and that might have led them to authorize this. 

My mind went in a bit of a different direction with regards to the original effort. I'm not surprised that nothing came of it, because my first thought was to question how that was really supposed to result in anything meaningful or actionable. And while technology would certainly result in clearer images today, my hope would be that police forces would still see this as an unlikely way of finding anything that would be useful -- with the exception of if a crime is actually committed and the perpetrator can be identified, but I think that is really a different thing.