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

Open this photo in gallery:

Four years ago, Farzad Alavi lost his wife, Neda, when Iran’s Revolutionary Guards shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, killing 176, including 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents. Two days later, he was denied entry to the U.S. because decades earlier he had been drafted into the Guards.

Dr. Alavi is not a supporter of the Revolutionary Guards. Far from it. He thinks they are terrorists. He and his wife, both doctors in Iran, emigrated to Canada in 2010 to get away from the regime. But like many Iranians before and since, he didn’t have a choice about being conscripted into the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

But in 2019, when the United States designated the IRGC a terrorist organization, former conscripts were barred from the U.S. They were put on a terror watch list that is shared with other countries, so even outside the U.S. people like Dr. Alavi face hours of interrogations before they get a boarding pass for an international flight.

Dr. Alavi still wants to see the IRGC designated as a terror group by Canada, and although he thinks it should not cover conscripts like the “defective” U.S. law, he wants them designated as terrorists above all. But some other Iranian-Canadians want to make sure Canada doesn’t do things in the dumb and unjust way the U.S. did.

That’s something to keep in mind after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday he is looking for ways to “responsibly” list the IRGC as a terrorist organization. He said that at a memorial for victims of the 2020 downing of PS752, before an audience including many relatives of victims who have called for the IRGC to be listed. There is political pressure: The Conservatives have been calling for it for years.

Certainly, the terrorist label fits the IRGC. There is a valid political statement in applying it. But the U.S. designated them in a way that hurt people who had fled Iran’s regime to places such as Canada.

Canada has to get out of its bubble

“If you want to pursue this, please consider a way to separate conscripts, because they had no choice,” said Maryam Shamloo, a researcher whose family has been separated by the policy. She was planning to move with her family from Winnipeg to Boston for a fellowship at Harvard Medical School but was refused entry in 2021 because her husband had been drafted into the IRGC 28 years ago. Now her family is separated while she completes her fellowship.

It’s not clear if it is legal to list the IRGC as a terror organization under Canada’s existing Criminal Code provisions, since they aren’t supposed to be applied to the military forces of foreign states. It might require a whole new law to do it. So let’s hear parliamentarians debate one.

There are already lots of sanctions on Iran and the IRGC, but if politicians have better ideas for isolating Revolutionary Guards, let’s see them draft them into new legislation. If there are ways to combat Iranian-regime intimidation of Iranian-Canadians, let’s add them. There are already sanctions that bar a large portion of the senior leaders of the IRGC from entering Canada, but if there are gaps, fill them.

But certainly don’t emulate the U.S. model.

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.