Mr. Speaker, I hesitate to improvise military policy on the fly in the House of Commons of Canada. I think a lot of suggestions will be made as to what additional form of military pressure could be put on Syria short of some kind of massive invasion or bombing. My own sense of the current civilian situation is that bombing of any indiscriminate kind would have a huge effect on the civilian population of Syria and would not advance the cause whatsoever.
The Syrian air force is not exactly without capability, so if we are going to establish a no-fly zone, we have to be aware of what the response would be from the Syrian air force. Our experience with other no-fly zones is that if we want to establish a no-fly zone, we would have to knock out virtually the entire air defence capacity of Syria. Doing that is an enormously complex and difficult undertaking, and one whose consequences one would have to understand.
My point is that in thinking through what we are going to do, at every step of the way we need to think through what the consequences of these actions would be. What are the next steps going to be? What are the conclusions that we are going to reach?
My concern on the one side is that if we are not prepared to look at every possibility, that will be read by the Assad regime as another get-out-of-jail-free card. They will continue to see this as the world talking big and doing little and they will continue to see it as a licence to do whatever they want to do.
On the other side, if we simply engage in an excess of rhetoric that leads us to say here are red lines and here are lines in the sand and here is what we are now going to do, everyone has to understand the importance of what I call consequential thinking. What is going to be the consequence of that step? How are we going to follow it up? I think the issue that the minister—