According to lawyers and medical researchers, Canada’s rocky relationship with the United States necessitates safeguarding a crucial resource: patient health information that can be used to train artificial intelligence. According to Ottawa-based intellectual property attorney Natalie Raffoul, “our health data is the most valuable health data set in the world.” “You can’t pool a data set like this in any other jurisdiction because no one else has a public health system like this with the kind of ethnic diversity that we do,” says the author. Experts say that many Canadian institutions store health data on American-run cloud servers. That and the United States President Donald Trump’s stated objective to make the U.S. a world leader in AI and his desire to make Canada a 51st state, means it’s possible that his administration could come after our data — perhaps citing national security concerns as he has with tariff executive orders, experts say.Dr. Amol Verma, a professor of AI research and education in medicine at the University of Toronto, said as artificial intelligence is increasingly used in health care, algorithms need to be trained on the most representative data possible to deliver accurate and useful results.
The U.S. doesn’t have that level of inclusivity in its own health data because its private health-care system means that many people without health insurance might not be accessing care and therefore their health information wouldn’t be captured, he said.That means that an AI model trained on U.S. data could be biased or not work well “in certain racial populations or linguistic populations” said Verma, who is also an internal medicine specialist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.
Dr. “Could be of significant economic benefit to the U.S., and having access to our data would be very valuable,” Kumanan Wilson, a physician at The Ottawa Hospital and research chair in digital health innovation at the University of Ottawa, stated. All of our major cloud service providers are American. They’re AWS — Amazon Web Services — Microsoft Azure, and there’s Google Cloud. And all of these could potentially be vulnerable to U.S. legislation if the Trump administration wanted to access that data,” he said, noting that many Canadian hospitals have data on those cloud servers.Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, said this wasn’t a concern on his radar prior to Trump’s inauguration — but things have changed.
“The recent political events in the relationship … between Canada and the United States requires at a minimum a willingness to re-examine or rethink just about everything,” he said.
The Canadian Press reached out to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google for comment.
Microsoft and Google both stated that they would not comment or speculate on hypothetical scenarios. However, they did point out that any government that desired access to data would need to be served with a valid court order or warrant. Microsoft also said its “legal compliance team reviews all requests to ensure they are valid, rejects those that are not valid, and only provides the data specified.”
Canadians’ health data at risk of Trump’s AI ambitions, experts warn
