Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to both Christina and Michael for being here.
To your second-last comment, Christina, I don't wake up every morning worried about dying in a terrorist attack either.
To carry on from something you said, Michael, you wondered if the terrorist threat was any worse than it was 20 years ago. I guess my comment would be that in 2006 we had the group of 18 in Toronto; two years ago we had Warrant Officer Vincent killed in the Montreal area and Corporal Cirillo in Ottawa; then just recently, not that far from where I live, a couple of hours to the south, there was a would-be terrorist, so I would say, respectfully, that the threat is probably there.
You were certainly correct that we can't compare it to Afghanistan, or even to some of the recent happenings in Europe—in Paris and what have you—but I think we do live in a different world today. You're nodding your head, so I presume you agree with me there.
Carrying that out, until we started these meetings earlier this week, I hadn't heard the term “metadata”. Of course, “encryption” is a word that we've heard lots of times, but not with the meaning that comes up here.
You made a comment earlier about strong encryption, which sounded like a good thing to a degree. Some of the criticism that comes out of Bill C-51 on some of the securities is about that encryption. Can you explain to me the difference between strong and good encryption, and how we deal with it, and the opposite?