What Canadian businesses must consider before sending personal data outside Canada (or Québec) for AI processing.
dgm is an independent osFoundry integration partner — not affiliated with osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC), and dgm has no completed client integrations yet.
Sending data to an AI service outside Canada is common — most major AI providers are US-based. Here is what Canadian businesses must consider before data crosses the border.
The PIPEDA position
PIPEDA permits cross-border transfer for processing as long as you provide a comparable level of protection through contracts or other means and are transparent that data may be processed abroad and subject to foreign legal access. It is an accountability model, not a ban.
The Quebec gate
Quebec Law 25 is stricter: before transferring personal information outside Quebec, you must complete a privacy impact assessment showing the data will receive adequate protection. For Quebec residents’ data, this is a real gate, not a formality.
Reducing the exposure
For sensitive data, the simplest way to avoid cross-border complexity is to keep processing in Canada. osFoundry’s managed cloud pins data to US, EU or Japan — it does not currently offer a Canadian managed region. For data that must stay in Canada, the honest path is self-hosting osFoundry (BYO Cloud) inside a Canadian cloud region such as AWS Canada (Montréal/Calgary), Azure (Toronto/Quebec City) or Google Cloud (Montréal), or running models locally on-device. Running models in a Canadian region or locally removes the transfer question for those workloads.
Where dgm fits
dgm is an independent integration partner that helps Canadian businesses adopt osFoundry — scoping a first use case, handling the build, and connecting AI to the systems you already run. dgm is independent of osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC) and has no completed client integrations yet, so everything described here is a service offered, not a past result. If you want to scope a practical first project, dgm can help you map it out.