It’s absurd for Prime Minister Mark Carney and his cabinet ministers to claim the need for confidentiality prevents them from explaining how a former intelligence commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was granted a temporary resident visa by Canada.
Mehdi Taj, president of the Iranian Football Federation, was turned away by the Canada Border Services Agency — the country’s last line of defence — upon arriving in Toronto last month on his way to a FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association) meeting in Vancouver.
But the Carney government has failed to explain how he was granted a visa in the first place.
Canada designated Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism, and classified the IRGC’s Quds Force as a terrorist organization in 2012.
In 2022, it designated senior officials of the Iranian government and its security and intelligence agencies as inadmissible to Canada.
In 2024, all of the IRGC was classified as a terrorist organization, under pressure from the Conservatives and Iranian human rights activists in Canada.
This isn’t just about the Iranian leadership being responsible for the murder, torture and imprisonment of tens of thousand of Iranian citizens and waging terrorism throughout the Mideast by Iranian proxies.
On Jan. 8, 2020, the IRGC blew a Ukrainian civilian airliner out of the sky with two surface-to-air missiles, shortly after it took off from Tehran airport, killing all 176 people on board, including 55 Canadians and 30 permanent residents of Canada.
CSIS has identified credible death threats by Iran against Canadians, including a failed attempt to assassinate former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler.
No one affiliated with the IRGC is supposed to be allowed into Canada and if they’re here they’re supposed to be deported.
The inexplicable granting of a visa to a former IRGC intelligence commander raises the issue of the failure of the federal government to deport what may be hundreds of agents of the Iranian regime living illegally in Canada.
So far they’ve booted out one — saying the process is complicated — but human rights activists and a 2023 investigation by Global News suggest there could be hundreds of agents of the Iranian regime living illegally in Canada.
What is the point of Canada declaring terrorist organizations if no one is deporting the terrorists?