This article originally appeared in The Globe and Mail.
By Sarah Teich, June 22, 2026
Toronto’s police chief recently described a pattern that should unsettle anyone who saw the recent shootings at synagogues, Jewish schools and the U.S. consulate as unrelated hate crimes. Police say a network of criminals-for-hire has been linked to 27 firearm discharges across the city – recruiting young adults online, paying them to fire on the exterior of a chosen building, and requiring a video of the act before any money is released.
Three people have been charged, and the investigation has already cost a life: Constable Marc Pinizzotto was killed during a raid connected to the consulate shooting. The case is an example of foreign interference carried out through terrorist financing, a hostile state reaching into Canada by paying for violence on its streets.
The global aspect of these crimes is now part of the official account, if not yet the police record. The Secretary of State for Combatting Crime told the House of Commons that the gunmen were allegedly paid-for hires engaged by a “foreign entity.”
U.S. prosecutors allege that an Iraqi commander of Kataib Hezbollah, Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi, is responsible for a range of these attacks across North America and Europe, including two in Canada. Kataib Hezbollah is backed by the Iranian regime, and Mr. al-Saadi allegedly worked closely with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, focusing on directing attacks against U.S. and Jewish targets, including synagogues. He is now awaiting trial in New York City.
Though the allegations remain untested in court, if the picture holds, this is foreign interference at its most direct. A foreign entity state that wants to intimidate a Canadian community, and to punish Canada and its allies for their foreign policy, no longer needs to send its own operatives. It can manipulate and hire vulnerable youth through encrypted applications and keep its own hand invisible.
The teenager allegedly paid to fire on a synagogue need not hate anyone he targets, requiring only a phone, a handgun and somewhere for the money to land.
The disposable local recruit then supplies exactly the deniability that makes foreign interference so hard to pin down.
This tactic extends beyond Iran-backed militias. Throughout its war on Ukraine, Russia has run the same playbook across Europe, recruiting minors through encrypted applications and paying them by the task for arson and sabotage.
This is violence converted into a commodity, something that can be commissioned, scaled and paid for like any other service. That logic is the subject of a report published this month by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and Secure Canada, which examined the structured payment programs some states and state-affiliated entities make to those who carry out terrorist attacks, and to their families, with rewards calibrated to the severity of the violence.
Paying for political violence is not new, as that record shows; it is the formality that varies. The structured payment programs described in the report may be more entrenched or institutionalized, but the architecture is the same, and so is the conclusion the report reaches: money is the load-bearing element and the place where prevention efforts must bite.
Terrorist financing, participation and facilitation provisions in the Criminal Code already reach those who knowingly pay for terrorist attacks. The Special Economic Measures Act and the Sergei Magnitsky Law already enable Canada to freeze the assets of, and bar entry to, foreign officials responsible for significant corruption, and terrorism financing can and should be construed as such. The recurring problem is that Canada has been too slow to prosecute and sanction officials responsible for the most egregious forms of terrorist financing, if the relevant officials are prosecuted and sanctioned at all.
This Toronto police investigation reaffirms that Canada, alongside the United States and Europe, has a foreign interference problem, one in which foreign entities work through terrorist organizations to target vulnerable youth for recruitment and then religious minorities’ places of worship with violence.
Standing with those targeted and protecting Canadians from the next attack requires understanding that what has occurred is foreign interference through terrorist financing. Combatting this phenomenon requires a systemic approach. We must confront the foreign entities paying for violence, as well as the technologies facilitating recruitment, prosecuting the financiers if they are present in Canada and imposing sanctions if they are not. We must use all the tools in our arsenal, and create new ones as needed, to confront these authoritarian-terrorist collaborations. And, above all else, we must support and stand with the victims.
Sarah Teich is co-founder and CEO of Human Rights Action Group, legal adviser to Secure Canada, and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
