Canadians’ health data at risk of Trump’s AI ambitions, experts warn

Medical researchers and lawyers say our rocky relationship with the U.S. creates an urgent need to protect a critical Canadian resource: patient health information.

Medical researchers and lawyers say our rocky relationship with the United States creates an urgent need to protect a critical Canadian resource: patient health information that can be used to train artificial intelligence.

“Our health data is the most valuable health data set in the world,” said Natalie Raffoul, an intellectual property lawyer in Ottawa.

“You can’t go to any other jurisdiction and be able to pool a data set like this because no one else has a public health system like this with the kind of ethnic diversity that we do.”

Many Canadian institutions use cloud servers run by American companies to store health data, experts say. That, combined with U.S. 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. Kumanan Wilson, research chair in digital health innovation at the University of Ottawa and a physician at The Ottawa Hospital, said health information, largely from electronic medical records, “could be of significant economic benefit to the U.S. and having access to our data would be very valuable.”