In terms of broad-scale surveillance, yes, China, North Korea, and these other countries might be hacking, but they're not doing it on anywhere near the same scale as what's going on from governments from within their own countries. Whereas within Canada, through any number of means, whether it's warrantless access through the telecommunications companies, whether it's back doors that could be put into different programs like in BlackBerry, whether it's like what we saw in the United States, where Yahoo actually allowed the United States government to go in and analyze every email that was sent ever on its servers.... That is something that is far beyond, as far as I know, the capabilities of these other actors—state, governmental, non-governmental, or whatever. You don't need to have broad-scale digital surveillance in order to counter that. You simply need to home in on the people you need to analyze. In fact, by having a government database that actually collects all this information, that collects all of Canadians' metadata—which, by the way, gives you a clearer picture of someone's life than the content of their emails, far more—you can tell everything from that, and obviously you're already familiar with that. To have all of that in some government database somewhere makes it suddenly extremely vulnerable.
On October 19th, 2016. See this statement in context.