By Sheryl Saperia and Ches W. Parsons, March 25, 2026
For years, Canadian advocates, security experts, and members of the Iranian-Canadian diaspora have urged Ottawa to take the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seriously: to name it, list it, and enforce the law against it without equivocation. For years, Ottawa has responded with partial measures, studied hesitation, and a series of distinctions that made partisan political sense but undermined national security.
The bill for that hesitation is now coming due.
Four weeks into a war that has killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and thrown the regime into upheaval, Canada’s border enforcement is struggling to keep pace. The Canada Border Services Agency has deemed roughly 32 individuals inadmissible under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act for links to the IRGC, a listed terrorist organization in Canada since June 2024. One has been deported. Four left voluntarily. The rest remain – with government officials and Opposition MPs citing active asylum claims, among other legal obstacles, as the reason removal proceedings have stalled. A quiet administrative measure introduced on March 1 extended work-permit renewals for Iranian nationals already inside Canada through March 2027. The government describes its response as aggressive. Given that a single deportation is apparently the measure of aggression, the word has lost its meaning.
To understand how Canada arrived here, it helps to remember the autumn of 2022, when Iran was convulsed by nationwide protests following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. Demonstrations led by women and youth, which were met with a violent and sometimes fatal crackdown by security forces, created intense pressure on Western governments to respond. Ottawa announced that senior IRGC officials would be rendered inadmissible under immigration law, and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland stated plainly that Canada considers the IRGC a terrorist organization. It was a significant moment and yet a partial one, because the government still failed at that time to officially designate the IRGC as a terrorist group. Even then, Ottawa kept getting stuck on the conscription issue – reluctant to implicate Iranians who were not given a choice about serving in the IRGC. The terror listing that finally came in June 2024 did not resolve that problem. The government’s position today remains that those who served only as conscripts are not necessarily inadmissible – only those with senior or voluntary involvement are. Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree reiterated this explicitly in parliamentary exchanges this month.
That argument deserves consideration. Iran does conscript men into military service, and it may not be just to treat every young Iranian who served a mandatory term as a terrorist.
But the argument weakens considerably under scrutiny of how the IRGC actually operates. The IRGC is not Iran’s conventional military. That is the Artesh, the regular armed forces. The IRGC is constitutionally mandated not to defend Iranian sovereignty but to protect the Islamic Revolution and export it – by any means. Its loyalties, as national security scholar Afshon Ostovar has written, are neither to Iran nor bound by geography. It runs foreign assassination networks, funds proxy militias, and has conducted campaigns of intimidation and transnational repression against Iranian communities abroad, including in Canada.
Moreover, researchers Saeid Golkar and Kasra Aarabi have documented that IRGC recruitment is ideologically driven in ways that complicate the conscript narrative. Since 2010, more than 70 per cent of IRGC draftees were already active members of the Basij, the volunteer paramilitary responsible for crushing domestic dissent and attacking protesters. The IRGC’s indoctrination system, which constitutes roughly half of recruit training, is designed to instill loyalty to the Khomeinist creed, not simply to produce soldiers. Mandatory service in an ideologically vetted, revolutionary paramilitary is a different matter than mandatory service in a conventional military.
Canada’s default posture must be reversed. Inadmissibility for IRGC membership should be the rule, not the exception, with the burden falling on the individual to demonstrate that their service was genuinely compelled and involved no participation in the organization’s violence or repression. If the government maintains the conscription loophole as currently applied, the incentive is clear: every IRGC official seeking entry will suddenly discover they were a conscript. Just as importantly, that case should be made from outside Canada – not by arriving, invoking the process, and waiting indefinitely while officials deliberate.
For those refused on security grounds abroad, Canadian law already provides recourse: section 42.1 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) gives the minister discretionary authority to permit entry despite membership in a terrorist organization where circumstances warrant it, with Federal Court judicial review as a further backstop. That is a meaningful check. It is not the open-ended exploitation that inland claims have made possible. Too many individuals have arrived, invoked the asylum process, and disappeared into the country when their claims failed. That pipeline must be closed. Asylum claims from individuals with any IRGC affiliation must be fast-tracked for dedicated security screening, and the work-permit extension issued in March 2026 should be suspended immediately for anyone under active CBSA review.
Iran is a demonstrated threat to Canada on Canadian soil. CSIS has confirmed credible death threats from Iran targeting individuals in this country. Iranian-Canadians have faced surveillance, harassment, and intimidation by regime operatives. Former justice minister Irwin Cotler was the target of an Iranian assassination plot. On March 1 of this year, Iranian missiles struck Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait – the facility known as Camp Canada, which houses Canadian special forces – causing damage to the installation. Critics slammed the Carney government for failing to disclose the attack promptly. And the families of the 176 people killed when Iran shot down Flight PS752 in January 2020 have argued for years that this country has become a sanctuary for the very officials responsible. They have not been wrong.
The enforcement system meant to prevent this was badly strained even before the current war began. Only a handful of CBSA officers were assigned to the Iran file, at an agency that was already significantly understaffed and facing budget pressure. Visa vetting has been degraded over time: in-person interviews are rare and decisions increasingly run through automated processes. Meanwhile, internal culture creates pressure to approve applications quickly rather than scrutinize them. If the system was inadequate before regime-linked individuals began seeking exits in large numbers, it is nowhere near adequate now. CBSA needs dedicated emergency resources for the Iran file: more officers, focused investigative capacity, and a clear mandate to treat this as a wartime security priority.
The bilateral dimension with the United States is real, though it should not be framed as simply deferring to Washington. Whatever strains exist in the relationship, and whatever disagreements have emerged over trade and other matters, Canada and the US share intelligence, a border, and a fundamental interest in not becoming a haven for operatives of a regime that has actively threatened both countries. American officials have already identified Canada as a serious concern for Iranian activity. Continued inaction will deepen that concern and compound existing bilateral tensions with an avoidable security credibility gap.
Canadians’ trust in their country’s immigration system has been badly eroded over the past decade. Rectifying the Iran file – by enforcing the law firmly, reversing the onus of proof on conscription, closing the inland exploitation pipeline, and resourcing the agencies tasked with doing so – is not a marginal concern. It is part of a broader obligation to demonstrate that Canada’s generosity is not the same thing as its credulity. The warnings have been ample. The tools exist. What has been missing is the will to use them.
Sheryl Saperia is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Ches W. Parsons is a retired RCMP assistant commissioner and its former director general of national security.
