Medicine researchers and lawyers say that our difficult relationship with the United States creates an urgent need to protect a critical Canadian resource: Patient health information which can be used to form artificial intelligence.
“Our health data is the most precious health data set in the world,” said Natalie Raffoul, an intellectual property lawyer in Ottawa.
“You cannot go to another jurisdiction and be able to pool a set of data like this because no one else has a public health system like this with the type of ethnic diversity we do.”
Many Canadian institutions use cloud servers managed by American companies to store health data, according to experts. This, combined with the declared objective of US President Donald Trump, to make the United States a world leader in AI and his desire to make Canada a 51st state, means that it is possible that his administration can come after our data-perhaps citing national security problems as he did with pricing decrees, according to experts.
Dr. Amol Verma, professor of AI research and education in medicine at the University of Toronto, said that artificial intelligence is increasingly used in health care, algorithms must be trained on the most representative data possible to provide precise and useful results.
The United States does not have this level of inclusiveness in its own health data because its private health system means that many people without health insurance may not access care and therefore their health information would not be captured, he said.
This means that an AI model formed on American data could be biased or not work well “in certain racial populations or linguistic populations”, said Verma, who is also a specialist in internal medicine at St. Michael’s hospital in Toronto.
Dr. Kumanan Wilson, research president in digital health innovation at the University of Ottawa and doctor at Ottawa Hospital, said that health information, largely of electronic medical records, “could be of an important economic advantage for the United States and having access to our data would be very precious.”
“Our main cloud suppliers are all American. They are AWS – Amazon Web Services – Microsoft Azure, and there is Google Cloud. And all this could potentially be vulnerable to American legislation if the Trump administration wanted to access this data,” he said, noting that many Canadian hospitals have data on these cloud servers.
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Michael Geist, Canada Research President in Internet and Electronic Commerce at the University of Ottawa, said it was not a concern for his radar before the inauguration of Trump – but things have changed.
“The recent political events of the relationship … between Canada and the United States require at least a desire to re-examine or rethink almost everything,” he said.
The Canadian press has contacted Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google to comment.
Microsoft and Google said they were not going to comment or speculate on hypothetical scenarios, but noted that if a government wanted access to data, it should serve them with a legal order or mandate.
Microsoft has also said that “its legal compliance team examines all requests to ensure that they are valid, reject those that are not valid and only provides specified data.”
Google said that if he received an order from the court which, she said, should be sent to the data owner, he would indicate the applicant to the customer.
A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services has returned the Canadian press to its website, which indicates that the company would not disclose the data, unless it was necessary to do so by a “legally valid and liaison order”. He also indicates that the company defends customer information and previously “disputed government requests for customers who, in our view, were too far away”.
AWS also published a statement saying that it had two data storage regions in Canada.
“There has been no requests for data in AWS which led to the disclosure of corporate data or government stored outside the United States in the United States since we started reporting this statistics,” the statement said.
But Raffoul and Geist said that the storage of Canadian health data in Canada can give institutions a false feeling of security if the company is American.
“Putting precious data and intellectual property in the hands of a Canadian subsidiary to a foreign multinational is essentially like awarding it to a foreign multinational. And that’s where there is a lot of confusion,” said Raffoul.
Geist said he was not convinced that the Trump administration would respect societies’ privacy measures, saying that “their effectiveness may not be to everyone”.
In addition, “even if the data is kept in Canada, which does not provide a complete guardrail against a request for disclosure of the United States court,” he said.
“Canadian law alone – at least as privacy is currently arising – will not really be enough because there are really not much penalties. This has been one of the long -standing criticism of Canadian privacy law,” Geist said.
One way to strengthen confidentiality laws, she said, is to add a “blocking status”.
A blockage status would indicate that an American company would be confronted with serious sanctions in Canada if it revealed Canadian data, which would allow an American judge to rule on the fact that there is a good reason why the company cannot respect by the American order to release it.
The best solution, according to experts, is to completely eliminate risks by creating more technological companies belonging to Canada that provide health data storage.
In addition to having enviable health data, Canada is undoubtedly a world leader in AI, according to experts. Nobel-Prix’s “sponsor of the AI” of Nobel-Prix, Geoffrey Hinton, did a large part of his work at the University of Toronto and as a chief scientific advisor at the Vector Institute in Toronto. The Canadian government has also established “bunches” of AI, including AI and digital, to advance research in the field.
Verma says that the current wave of patriotism through Canada triggered by Trump’s assault is an opportunity to pool health data through provincial and territorial borders and use it to build even stronger AI algorithms in health care.
“This is where I think there is a truly exciting opportunity at that time because our political leaders speak of the need for our provinces to work together,” he said.
“I think there is an opportunity window where Canada can capitalize on its strengths and advantages. But if we are slow or complacent, then we will be late,” said Verma.