Let us both take a crack at answering that. Looking back at Canadian foreign and defence policy, because they're intimately linked, I think one of the real disappointments for me is the decline in our capacity for intellectual leadership. Over the years we've talked about Canada being a middle power, of Canada being a peacekeeper, and so on. What that really always implied was that Canada had its ear to the ground, was thinking creatively, and came up with solutions to problems that sometimes nobody else was able to do, either because they didn't have the freedom to think that way or they didn't have the temerity to articulate these kinds of things.
When Mr. Brahmi talked about our recommendation 7 and some of the things that are past their prime, the institutions, laws, and so on were all created between 1899 and 1945-1949. There's not much intellectual novelty in our thinking about international issues since that time, with the possible exception of R2P, responsibility to protect. There we're schizophrenic. Look at Libya. That was a classic example of where the responsibility to protect should have kicked in. And Syria in spades. But what did we do in Libya? We said you can intervene but no boots on the ground; you can protect civilians but only from the air and from the sea. Since when is that the way you structure soldiers to go and do good to protect civilians? Imagine police being required to operate under those kinds of parameters.
We have to do something about that sort of thing, the doctrine of pre-emption. We're still focused on how much do you have to know and when do you have to know it before you can take some action. The international law of a war, armed conflict, detainees, all that kind of stuff—instead of arguing about those things, we should put our minds to coming up with new international conventions, and if necessary institutions that reflect those conventions to give people some guidelines about how to manage security in the 21st century. For me that's the biggest downside.