Mehdi Taj<\/a>, president of the Iranian Football Federation, was turned away by the\u00a0Canada Border Services Agency \u2014 the country\u2019s last line of\u00a0defence\u00a0\u2014 upon arriving in Toronto last month on his way to a FIFA (Federation\u00a0Internationale\u00a0de Football Association) meeting in Vancouver.\u00a0<\/p>\nBut the Carney government has failed to explain how he was granted a visa in the first place.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Canada designated Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism, and classified the IRGC\u2019s Quds Force as a terrorist organization in 2012.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2022, it\u00a0designated\u00a0senior officials of the Iranian government and its security and intelligence agencies as inadmissible to Canada.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2024,\u00a0all of\u00a0the IRGC was classified as a terrorist organization, under pressure from the Conservatives and Iranian human rights activists in Canada.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This\u00a0isn\u2019t\u00a0just about the\u00a0Iranian leadership\u00a0being responsible for\u00a0the murder,\u00a0torture\u00a0and imprisonment of tens of\u00a0thousand\u00a0of Iranian citizens and waging terrorism throughout the Mideast by Iranian proxies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
CSIS has\u00a0identified\u00a0credible death threats by Iran against Canadians, including a failed attempt to assassinate former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler.<\/p>\n
No one affiliated with the IRGC is supposed to be allowed into Canada and if they\u2019re here they\u2019re supposed to be deported.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So\u00a0far\u00a0they\u2019ve\u00a0booted out one \u2014 saying the process is complicated \u2014 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What is the point of Canada declaring terrorist organizations if no one is deporting the terrorists?\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s\u00a0absurd for Prime Minister Mark Carney and his cabinet ministers to claim the need for confidentiality prevents them…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31898,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17,1518,12965,14497,14495,111,9362,14496,14498],"class_list":{"0":"post-31897","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-canada","8":"tag-canada","9":"tag-canada-border-services-agency","10":"tag-federation-internationale-de-football-association","11":"tag-human-rights-activists","12":"tag-iranian-football-federation","13":"tag-mark-carney","14":"tag-revolutionary-guard-corps","15":"tag-temporary-resident-visa","16":"tag-terrorist-organization"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}