The Pursuit of Canadian National Cyber Resilience Against Evolving Threats

Cyberspace has become home to the digital platforms where more and more Canadians live, work, play, and learn. The unfortunate corollary is that, for all the opportunity and optimism cyberspace presents, it is also the space where adversaries and malign actors of all stripes actively seek—and too readily find—opportunities to exploit its human and technical vulnerabilities. Our collective goal must be to make it costlier for them to do their worst and limit the impact on Canada and Canadians. We can take some comfort in having a relatively confident and digitally literate population and in knowing that cybersecurity practices in Canada are generally evolving in the right direction. Our deeper understanding of the cyber threat should generate more discussion about national cyber resilience and the urgent need to create a high-functioning, multi-jurisdictional Canadian cyber commons with distributed leadership and clear expectations and rules of engagement. In the end, it will take all Canadians working together to protect Canada’s cyber systems and networks. In the longer term, national cyber resilience will be measured in fewer and less serious incidents, faster and more coordinated incident responses, and lower recovery costs and impacts.