Madam Speaker, I am going to have to try to keep a very long explanation very short.
The hope for ending genocide within a country, to stop a government from ethnic cleansing, from killing an entire population within its borders, is in the emerging principle of responsibility to protect at a global level. Unfortunately, Canada, I think inadvertently, but clumsily, assisted in damaging that concept, maybe irrevocably, with allies in the mission in Libya, where the UN Security Council, which means Russia and China, agreed that western forces would go into Libya to protect the Libyan people from Moammar Gadhafi. When we shifted from responsibility to protect to regime change, we damaged the principle so strongly that we were unable to help the people in Syria when they needed our help the most in 2011. We allowed Libya to become a failed state. We allowed Moammar Gadhafi to be killed in the street, and we damaged the process and the hope of an international principle of responsibility to protect.
It is in rebuilding it that the world community, including Security Council members, will ever again authorize a military mission within a sovereign country to protect its own people.