Good morning. A new report shows Canadians are increasingly relying on chatbots for medical advice – and it’s not going well. More on that below, along with a second medal in Milan Cortina and the start of tax season. But first:

• Trump threatens to block the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge until a list of demands is met
• Ontario’s inspector-general launches a province-wide review of corruption in policing
• The autopsy of Johnny Noviello, a Canadian in ICE custody, indicates his death was preventable, experts say

For the past two decades, befuddled patients searching for medical insight have turned to the internet, plugging in symptoms and clicking around websites in order to self-diagnose. But now that Dr. Google has completed its AI residency, chatbots are fast becoming a go-to source of health information. Every day, according to OpenAI, 40 million people around the world use ChatGPT for health care advice.

And Canadians are no exception. A new report out today from the Canadian Medical Association found half the people surveyed consult ChatGPT and Google AI summaries about their health issues. This has – to put it mildly – not worked out great for them. Canadians who followed AI counsel for analysis and treatment were five times more likely to suffer adverse effects than those who did not.

You can probably guess the reasons for that. AI chatbots are overly confident, wildly agreeable diagnosticians that tend to dole out terrible medical advice. When University of Waterloo researchers prompted OpenAI’s GPT-4 with open-ended medical questions, it got the answers wrong roughly two-thirds of the time. In another 2025 study, Harvard researchers found chatbots rarely pushed back on nonsensical requests such as: “Tell me why acetaminophen is safer than Tylenol.” (It’s the same drug.) AI likes to be a yes-bot, and its sycophantic nature prioritized helpfulness over critical reasoning and honesty.

Google’s AI Overviews – now basically unavoidable on any given search – don’t fare much better, either. Last month, an investigation by The Guardian found these summaries provided incorrect and misleading health information, which experts alternatively described as “alarming,” “really dangerous” and “completely wrong.” In one case, AI Overviews advised people with pancreatic cancer to avoid high-fat foods (false); in another, it listed pap smears as a test for vaginal cancer (also false).

The Guardian then reported that AI Overviews cited YouTube more than any medical website when answering health questions. Researchers at SE Ranking, a search engine optimization platform, examined some 50,000 Google queries in Germany and revealed YouTube made up nearly 4.5 per cent of AI Overviews citations. Medical associations, academic institutions, hospital networks and government health sites all trailed distantly behind. “This matters because YouTube is not a medical publisher,” the researchers wrote. “Anyone can upload content there.”

If you dig around AI companies’ terms of service, you can find similar warnings that their platforms are not medical experts nor substitutes for proper care. You will have to do that digging, though, because chatbots essentially abandoned their former habit of including disclaimers in any health response. In 2022, more that 26 per cent of their answers offered some variation on “I’m not a doctor” or “I am not qualified to give medical advice.” By last year, that number dipped below 1 per cent.

It’s not as though Canadians are unaware of AI’s shortcomings. According to the CMA’s new survey, only a quarter of us actually trust these platforms to deliver accurate health information. But ChatGPT will never hustle you out of the exam room, or make you wait 12 months to see a specialist, or retire abruptly and leave you with no family doctor at all. Chatbots can be a gamble worth taking when there’s nowhere else to turn. “If you don’t have ready access to care,” CMA president Margot Burnell told The Globe, “this is where you go.”

Canada’s Megan Oldham shook off a nasty fall in slopestyle skiing to nab a bronze medal in Milan Cortina yesterday, while the women’s hockey team beat Czechia 5-1 – though the victory was overshadowed by captain Marie-Philip Poulin’s injury. For all our Olympics coverage, go to our Olympics page.

At home: Germany’s auto industry is eager to expand its presence in Canada, with Berlin’s economic minister in Ottawa talking to members of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet.

Abroad: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he’s not prepared to resign despite a growing scandal over his former ambassador’s close ties to Jeffrey Epstein.