As Canadians share more and more genetic data with service providers such as insurance companies or databases like Ancestry.com, the potential for discrimination based on this data is growing. Known as genetic discrimination (GD), this practice is broadly defined as the differential treatment of an individual compared to the rest of the population based on actual or presumed genetic information. Although the Genetic Non-Discrimination Act (GNDA) was passed in 2017 to protect Canadians from GD, a team at the Centre of Genomics and Policy of McGill University has found that many life insurance companies have found ways to circumvent these rules.
