Clark:To list Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group, Canada needs a better way

Agree, appropriate distinction:

….Simply designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization would mean any non-citizen draftee in the IRGC would be barred from Canada – visitors, students, immigrants – with only narrow grounds to appeal.

The IRGC is big, counting roughly 150,000 troops, according to University of Ottawa professor Thomas Juneau. That means there have been a lot of conscripts. They don’t have a choice of whether they are sent to the army, the police or the Revolutionary Guards. Mahmoud Azimaee, a statistician and former conscript who was declared inadmissible to the U.S. last year, believes there are probably 10,000 Canadians who are former IRGC conscripts.

Any new regulation or law must include a well-crafted carve-out for those people.

The U.S. Trump administration didn’t do that in 2019, and it was a mistake. But the Biden administration hasn’t touched it out of fear of being labelled soft on Iran.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a Congressional committee in 2022 that listing Iran as a terrorist organization didn’t add much in practice, except barring more people from entering the U.S. – chiefly conscripts. “The people who are the real bad guys have no intention of travelling here, anyway,” he said.

Source: To list Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group, Canada needs a better way