Health and Social Science Data—The Need to Reform Canada's Research Infrastructure.

The article focuses on the challenges and opportunities related to data infrastructure for health and social science research in Canada. It highlights that despite the roles of Statistics Canada and the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), critical data remain siloed within provinces, limiting the ability to conduct sophisticated, multi-jurisdictional research. The current Canadian research funding and organizational structures inadequately support the continuous data curation, integration, and analysis needed for leading-edge research, particularly in areas such as long COVID, heart attack care variation, cancer screening, firm growth dynamics, aging populations, and AI in health care. The article argues for recognizing health and social science data infrastructure as "big science," akin to major physical science facilities, and proposes creating a joint governance council involving Statistics Canada, academic researchers, and federal funders to oversee sustained, large-scale data infrastructure and research. It also emphasizes the need to overcome provincial data access barriers and to provide ongoing funding for multidisciplinary teams to fully realize Canada's research potential.