Mr. Chair, I listened intently to my friend when he answered the question about what we could possibly do and he said “lots of things”. We could actually do lots of things. NGOs could do lots of things. The government could do lots of things. When he finally arrived at specifying one thing, he specified an election observation mission, and that is interesting. The country he was referring to was Ukraine, which is just a tiny bit different than Mali. There are not a lot of terrorists running around in Ukraine today. I am not sure how we would send 500 Canadians to Mali and protect them. We would probably have to send a lot of troops there to protect the Canadian observation mission to observe that election.
Some form of international observation mission I am sure will be suggested and Canada will certainly consider it when that is suggested by the appropriate international organization. I do not think sending 500 Canadian civilians with a lot of Canadian soldiers to protect them from the al-Qaeda terrorists makes a lot of sense right now.