Protect ‘valuable’ Canadian health data from Trump’s AI aspirations, experts urge – CTV
April 24, 2025
TORONTO — 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 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 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.
