On June 20, the Ghislain Dufour Business Forum was pleased to welcome Éric Caire, Member of Parliament for La Peltrie, Minister of Cybersecurity and Digital Technology, and Minister Responsible for Access to Information and the Protection of Personal Information.
In his remarks, Caire noted that while governments understand that IT and security are now inseparable, the challenge of moving from an era of working in silos to an era of sharing expertise across departments remains.
The Minister mentioned three major challenges in this respect. The first is the mobility of data, whereby a lot of paper copies are still being printed just to check the validity of digital data. The second issue is digital illiteracy, which leads to the printing of an impressive quantity of briefing documents when it would be so much easier to consult directly the digital information that was used to prepare them. The third issue is that of cybersecurity, where cyber crime is literally exploding. In turn, this cyber crime generates major risks affecting the private lives of citizens, public safety, territorial security, and the economy.
Fortunately, Quebec now has a cybersecurity innovation centre that is working to establish several partnerships with government departments and the private sector to manage such risks and position Quebec as a North American cybersecurity gateway. Minister Caire says we are in an excellent position to do this because of Quebec's leading-edge expertise and dynamism in this area.
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The Ghislain Dufour Business Forum allows business people to meet and engage in dialogue with Quebec and Canadian political and business figures, political advisors or high-level public administrators on an apolitical and non-partisan basis. For more information, visit the event page.
