Estonia, Internet, Legislation, Technology

Estonia and Canada are already actively cooperating in the digital field and the new agreement presents another opportunity to further strengthen that cooperation, Palo said in a press release. "Our cooperation agreement with Canada sums up the mutual interests determined in the past year. We want to continue with joint projects as well as the exchange of ideas and experience in the field of e-governance and artificial intelligence," she added.

Canada's government is carrying out a modernization of its e-state and as part of that the North American country wants to learn about the opportunities the X-Road data exchange layer offers. Public sector institutions in Estonia exchange information using the high-security X-Road and Canada is considering implementing the same technology.

"X-Road would enable Canada's residents to use public e-services similarly to how it's done in Estonia. Thanks to the X-Road state databases can interact with each other and Estonians can use, for example, the pre-filled out income statement and our population registry can gather necessary data without people having to submit these separately," Palo said.

While Canada's interest is to learn about Estonia's e-governance and public sector's data exchange experience, Estonia's goal is cooperation in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Canada is one of the leading countries in the world in the field of AI research and development and is planning to actively implement it in the public sector. Estonia wants to cooperate with Canada to draw up a policy framework to responsibly implement AI solutions in Estonia.