Medical researchers and lawyers say our rocky relationship with the US creates an urgent need to protect important Canadian resources. It is patient health information that can be used to train artificial intelligence.
“Our health data is the world's most valuable health data set,” said Natalie Lafour, an intellectual property lawyer in Ottawa.
“We cannot go to other jurisdictions and we cannot pool such datasets.
Many Canadian institutions use cloud servers run by American companies to store health data, experts say. That means that, coupled with the US President's purpose to make the US a global leader in AI and his desire to make Canada the 51st state, his administration could come after our data.
Dr. Amol Verma, professor of AI research and education at the University of Toronto, said that with artificial intelligence increasingly being used in healthcare, algorithms need to be trained on the most representative data possible to provide accurate and useful results.
The private health system may not have access to care because many people without health insurance may not have access to care, so the US does not have that level of inclusiveness in its own health data.
This means that AI models trained with US data are biased or do not function well “in a particular racial or linguistic group.”
Dr. Kumanan Wilson, research chair for digital health innovation at the University of Ottawa and a physician at Ottawa Hospital, said health information, primarily from electronic medical records, is “a great economic benefit for the United States, and access to data would be extremely valuable.”
“Our major cloud providers are all Americans. They are AWS – Amazon Web Services – Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. And all of these could be vulnerable to US law if the Trump administration wants to access that data,” he said.
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Michael Geist, Canadian research chair for Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, said this was not a concern about his radar before Trump took office, but things have changed.
“Recent political events in relations… between Canada and the US, there's at least a willingness to reconsider or rethink everything,” he said.
The Canadian press has contacted Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google for comments.
Both Microsoft and Google said they would not comment or speculate on the hypothetical scenario, but noted that if the government wants access to data, it should be provided by a legal court order or warrant.
Microsoft also said, “We will review all requests to ensure that the legal compliance team is in effect, reject any that is not valid, and provide only the specified data.”
Google said that if it receives a court order that it believes should be directed towards the owner of the data, the requester will be directed towards the client.
A spokesman for Amazon Web Services introduced the Canadian media to its website. This states that data will not be disclosed unless it is required to do so in a “legally valid and binding order.” We also defended customer information and stated that we previously “disputed the government's demands for customer information that we believed was overloaded.”
AWS has also issued a statement that there are two data storage areas within Canada.
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“There have been no data requests to AWS, and since we began reporting this statistics, it has led to disclosure of corporate or government data stored in the US government outside of the United States,” the statement said.
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However, both Raffoul and Geist said storing Canadian health data within Canada could create a false sense of safety for the agency if the company is American.
“Getting valuable data and intellectual property in the hands of a Canadian subsidiary to a foreign multinational company is essentially like giving it to a foreign multinational company.
Geist said he is not convinced that the Trump administration will respect corporate privacy measures, saying “their effectiveness may not be ironic.”
He further said, “Even if data is kept in Canada, it does not provide a complete guardrail for US court disclosure requests.”
“The Canadian law itself — at least as privacy law stands now — is not really enough because it's not really that much due to penalties. It's one of the many years of criticisms of Canada's privacy law,” Geist said.
One way to strengthen privacy laws he said is to add a “block of law.”
The blocking law states that US companies face serious penalties in Canada if they disclose Canadian data, so American judges can determine that there is a strong reason why companies cannot release US orders.
Experts say the best solution is to completely eliminate risk by building more Canadian-owned technology companies that provide health data storage.
In addition to having enviable health data, experts say Canada is undoubtedly a global leader in AI. Nobel Prize-winning “AI Godfather” Jeffrey Hinton has spent much of his work at the University of Toronto as the Chief Advisor of Science Advisor at the Vector Institute in Toronto. The Canadian government has also established AI “clusters” that include scale AI and digital, and is currently conducting research on-site.
Verma says the current wave of patriotism across Canada, sparked by the Trump attack, is an opportunity to pool health data across state and territorial boundaries and use it to build even more powerful AI algorithms in healthcare.
“We have a really exciting opportunity at this moment as our political leaders are talking about the need for our state to work together,” he said.
“I think there's a window into the opportunity for Canada to leverage its strengths and leads, but if we're late or satisfied, we'll be behind,” Verma said.