Canadians health data at risk of Trumps AI ambitions, experts warn – National [Video]

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.

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