I share your concern, and I agree with you. Oftentimes I feel that even companies in the financial sector that have fairly sophisticated security organizations internal to themselves don't see the threats coming. They know that threats in general are coming, but to your point, the particular reasons they suffer a breach or are targeted for attack often have nothing to do with that institution. Perhaps the foreign threat is doing it to get back at the Canadian government for some action they took. Just as commonly these days it's for economic competitiveness reasons. Those Canadian financial institutions may not be harming anyone else, but there may be another bank in another country or another investor that wants to out-compete those Canadian institutions. If they can't do it fairly in the open market, maybe they can get help from a cyber-threat group, for example.
Unfortunately, Canada's financial institutions are targeted not necessarily because they're doing anything, other than for cybercrime, obviously—that's where the money is—but when it's a nation-state doing it, it's often for economic competitiveness. They want to either learn from or out-compete those institutions when making foreign investments. It could be for political retribution, even for something that happens in a different country.
The flip side of being in a strong alliance is that if a hacker finds a vulnerability in a Canadian financial institution, they could use that to propagate a political message against another member of NATO, for example. It could have nothing to do with that institution at all. That's why it's so important to have the close ties between Canada's security services, which are going to have better insight into those motivations, and the private sector.