Mr. Speaker, my thanks go to the erudite and wise member for Ottawa—Orléans for sharing his time with me.
It is considerable sadness that I rise in the House to do something that I never dreamed I would need to do, which is to convince the members of the Liberal Party to return to the internationalist and multilateralist roots of Liberal foreign policy and to reject the isolationism that its current leader wishes to impose upon it. To be clear, the Liberal leader wants his caucus to turn its back as he has turned his back on the atrocities being committed against innocent women and children in Iraq.
I would like to speak today about the multilateral and internationalist policies, like the responsibility to protect doctrine, which used to be the foundation of the Liberal Party's foreign policy, but which the current Liberal leader recently brushed aside with two short sentences amid a lengthy speech about what Canada's response should be to the atrocities being committed against women and children in Iraq, even as we speak.
Every state has the responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The international community has an obligation to assist states to fulfill that function. The international community has recognized that its members may have to act quickly to protect innocent citizens against ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. For geopolitical reasons of its own, which I urge members of the Liberal Party to reject, China has expressed reluctance to allow the UN to invoke the R2P doctrine, vetoing R2P in response to the deaths of innocent civilians in Syria to date.
In the case we are debating today, however, where unlike the government of Syria, which resisted any effective international intervention, Iraq has actually invited Canada and others to provide military assistance to protect its citizens against the ethnic cleansing and other atrocities being perpetrated by ISIL. There is no reason to prevent the international community from acting.
I would like to quote from the Liberal Party policy document, “Canada in the World: a Global Network Strategy”, which represented the tradition of the Liberal Party before the current Liberal leader reshaped it to conform to his own unthoughtful and dictatorial whims. The document says:
Another Canadian-inspired idea, Responsibility to Protect, will ensure that military intervention is truly a last resort, but that when sovereign states fail to protect their people and the international community mobilizes to stop large-scale harm to innocent life (for example in genocide and ethnic cleansing), Canada will be there.
The same Liberal Party policy document also endorsed “A muscular approach to renewing Canadian multilateralism”.
This is not simply a Liberal Party sentiment. This is actually the policy of governments of Canada, past and present. This is the tradition that is being pursued by our Prime Minister today in the resolution that we are debating. Unfortunately, it is a tradition which the recent remarks of the Liberal leader show has been abandoned under his leadership in favour of spurning our multilateral ties with close allies and adopting instead an unpredictable and inept isolationist approach.
It is also helpful to quote from last week's report by the United Nations office for human rights, which said:
ISIL and associated armed groups intentionally and systematically targeted these (Turkmen, Shabak, Christians, Yezidi and other) communities for gross human rights abuses, at times aimed at destroying, suppressing or cleansing them from areas under their control...OHCHR notes that many of the violations and abuses perpetrated by ISIL and associated armed groups may amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity.
That report recommended that:
Iraqi political leaders should use every opportunity and urgently achieve a substantial and effective resolution of the crisis by restoring control over the areas that have been taken over by ISIL....
It is for that purpose that Iraqi leaders have reached out and requested international and Canadian military assistance.
In the face of this authoritative report of unspeakable atrocities, what did the leader of the Liberal Party propose should be the world's response? He suggested that R2P required the international community to provide no more than development assistance to Iraq and refugee assistance to Turkey, as if somehow that would protect innocent women and children from the slavery, murder, and other atrocities being perpetrated by ISIL. Shame. Tell that to the women and girls in ISIL's slave markets. Tell that to the children who will have to watch their parents butchered before their eyes by ISIL.
The Liberal leader called on the parties in Iraq to come up with:
...an inclusive government that speaks for and represents all Iraqi men and women....a government that is fair-minded and which respects the many ethnic minorities within its borders.
As if somehow a series of Canadian-sponsored seminars would convince ISIL to stop committing atrocities and to become fair-minded and respectful of minorities.
Perhaps that would have been an admirable prescription for the Iraq of 2004, but it has absolutely no air of reality today in 2014. Had I not read the Liberal leader's words myself, I would hardly believe that such an uninformed view could come from any member of the House, much less the leader of the Liberal Party.
I do not pretend that the international responsibility to protect, which has arisen in Iraq, is susceptible to any easy or predictable course. The government of Iraq, which has requested international help to protect innocent civilians within its borders, is not itself an ideal ally. The strength of ISIL has been misjudged up to this point. Military commanders, as in any armed conflict, will need to proceed step by step to contain our adversaries, and the course of that battle plan cannot be predictable.
Nonetheless, the responsibility of the international community, including Canada, to protect those innocent women and children in Iraq from ISIL could not be clearer. The resolution before us today offers a modest, even minimalist, Canadian contribution to the international responsibility to protect. We could not do any less.
I expect I am not alone in this House in wishing that pacifism was a sufficient answer to atrocity and to mortal threats. We would all prefer to avoid causing anyone's death, and no Canadian takes any glory in military action. However, no government can proceed without a firm commitment to protect its citizens. It has been one of the great advances in our international practice to recognize the global implications and application of that principle.
I have no great expectation that the NDP will turn aside from the isolationist approach with which it so often shrouds itself. However, I expect better of our colleagues in the Liberal Party.
I urge them to turn away from isolationism and to embrace Canada's role in multilateral efforts to assist the international community in fulfilling its responsibility to protect innocent women and children from the ongoing genocide and other atrocities in Iraq. I urge them not to surrender the time-tested principles of respected Liberal foreign policy to the dictates of the current leader.