Election commentary: Canada and Iran

Over the past 10 years, Canadian foreign policy on Iran was focused on human rights, terrorism and the nuclear question. Consistent with Canada’s position since 1984, the government sponsored UN resolutions condemning Iran’s appalling record of political and religious persecution.

There were many hearings in Parliament on the plight of Iranian political prisoners, reflecting a multiparty consensus on human rights. The brutal rape and murder in 2003 of Canadian-Iranian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison brought this grim reality home.

Following the brutal repression of the Green Movement in 2009 — the so-called Twitter Revolution — a new wave of refugees arrived, making Canada home to one of the most significant Iranian diasporas in the world. In support of Iranian civil society, the government pursued direct diplomacy through an Internet-based interactive conversation.

In regard to terrorism and the nuclear issue, Canada adopted punitive laws and multilateral blanket sanctions. This isolated the Iranian regime, but also hurt ordinary Iranians, adding to their misery from the regime’s hyper-corruption and economic mismanagement.

Despite condemning President Ahmadinejad, however, Canada remained one of the favourite locations for money-laundering by these same corrupt Iranian officials. This included the former head of Sepah bank — considered the “financial lynchpin” of Iran’s nuclear program and terrorist operations — who acquired Canadian citizenship with impunity.

The termination of diplomatic relations in 2012 may have to be carefully reconsidered in light of the P5+1 Geneva agreement on the nuclear question, which is connected with internal political struggles within Iran. The agreement is mostly a defeat for the regime and it is preferable to threats of war that could exacerbate volatility in this already troubled region.

While important, the nuclear issue is only one element of a wider equation. The Shiite-Sunni proxy wars between Iran and Saudi Arabia have destabilized an arc encompassing Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen, and Afghanistan, created the context for the rise of the Islamic State, and further complicated the Israeli-Palestinian and Turkish-Kurdish conflicts.

The humanitarian toll has been catastrophic and there is a prospect for further escalation unless there is a long-term solution that replaces myopic balance-of-power equations with a visionary but pragmatic process of regional peace-building and integration with a democratically transformed Iran at the epicentre of a new Middle East.

Canada can play a leadership role in this regard through a more vigorous engagement with the UN.