Canada listed Iran as a state supporter of terrorism under the State Immunity Act in 2012.
A formal designation of a terrorist group makes it possible to freeze or seize an entity’s property and requires banks and financial institutions to block and report any transactions.
Yet multiple sources said a terrorist listing of the IRGC would have an impact potentially on Iranian-Canadian citizens and permanent residents drafted into military service in Iran who would no longer be able to travel or send money to support family still living there.
The IRGC is a branch of the Iranian armed forces, and therefore a state actor, and there is no precedent for listing a state as a terrorist organization.
A senior government source acknowledged there would be challenges to monitoring and enforcing such a terrorist listing, but declined to elaborate.
Government officials declined to disclose numbers or estimates of how many Iranians in Canada could be affected by such a designation.
One official said it would also mean any person who ever served in the IRGC would be deemed inadmissible to Canada.
In 2012, the previous Conservative government expelled Iranian diplomats, closed Canada’s embassy in Tehran, and listed the IRGC’s Quds Force as a terrorist entity. The Quds Force is the clandestine branch of the IRGC responsible for funding, arming and training extremist operations of external groups like the Taliban, Hezbollah, or Hamas.
Since cutting diplomatic ties, Canada has had to rely on proxies like Italy and Switzerland to aid in consular emergencies, such as when Concordia University professor Homa Hoodfar was imprisoned.
The U.S. under former president Donald Trump listed the IRGC as a terrorist entity in 2019 after accusing Iran of continuing nuclear weapons development. President Joe Biden has retained that designation.
In 2018, MPs unanimously supported a motion urging Canada to do just that.
Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong this week accused the government of doing nothing once the headlines faded.
Freeland and other ministers were heckled at a rally on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday. She said Wednesday, “their fight for justice is Canada’s fight, and it’s very important for them to know that.”
Thomas Juneau, a former policy analyst at the federal defence department now with the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, said in an interview there may be “rhetorical symbolic value” for Canada to take the step of putting the terrorist label on the IRGC, but if it cannot enforce it, there is also a cost to government credibility.
He said even if Ottawa wanted to carve out an exemption for low-level conscripts, “some conscripts have blood on their hands” while others don’t, “and how do you know that?”
The Iranian government is not going to “open their databases for us to verify if this individual actually was a conscript, was really a cook, and what kind of combat training did he have, and what mission was he deployed on, and so on,” he said.
Liberal MP Rob Oliphant, parliamentary secretary for foreign affairs, said in an interview, “if it were simple to do, it would have been done already.”
Oliphant said the government needs to “make sure that we don’t cause more pain and suffering to Canadians who are here, who are contributing or engaged.” He said Ottawa also doesn’t want to limit opportunities “for people to get out of Iran in the future who may be trying to escape that tyrannical regime” or limit its already diminished ability to help Canadians in consular emergencies in that country.
“We hear the call from Iranian Canadians — it’s a strong call to list, so we’re obviously trying to find a way to do it that causes the least amount of damage possible,” Oliphant said. “How do we do that and carve out something legislatively that has more subtlety and more finesse than a simple listing?”
He pointed to an exchange he had last week, when an Iranian-Canadian sought his help, asking: “‘Can’t Canada negotiate something with the United States so I can travel to the United States for work; I cannot go because I was conscripted into the IRGC as a young Iranian. I did my military service there, I cannot go to the United States. I am allowed to come to Canada. I became a PR (permanent resident), I became a citizen. I’m engaged in society here. I passed every security clearance for Canada. United States has said I’m not allowed to go there because I’m a terrorist.’”
This week, the Liberal government levied new sanctions against 25 individuals and nine entities in response to the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s so-called morality police over the alleged crime of not wearing a hijab. To date, Canada has levied sanctions on a total of 66 individuals and 170 entities.
Jessica Davis, a former analyst with CSIS and an expert in counterterrorism money-laundering, said there is very little public transparency on just how effective previous Iran sanctions have been, or to what extent they have been violated.
Multicultural Meanderings 