Mr. Speaker, perhaps the Minister of Foreign Affairs just misspoke, and I will give him a chance to correct what he said. I just heard him say “We are there to support Syria.”
This is a deeply complex and mutually contradictory position that the administration and the Prime Minister are attempting to put forward. It is the idea that we can violate the sovereign integrity of another nation state, Syria, by conducting bombing missions in that state. We seem to think that international law only applies when we want to criticize Mr. Putin for violating the sovereign integrity of Ukraine. When we play games with international law, we are looking at finding ourselves with nowhere safe to stand.
As this mission is being proposed, we will put Canadian pilots into harm's way and violate the sovereign integrity of a country run by a brutal dictator, Bashar al-Assad, in the hope that he will not retaliate against that violation of his sovereignty because we will be taking aim at his enemies, ISIL. In the west, we used to think that ISIL members were rebels against Bashar al-Assad, so certainly they were better than Bashar al-Assad. We now seem to think that they might not be better than Bashar al-Assad.
Whose side are we on? Do we have any idea how this will play out in international law?