This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By Sheryl Saperia and Ches W. Parsons, June 29, 2026
Last week, the United States and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding meant to end the war that began in February. It extends a ceasefire, reopens the Strait of Hormuz and, most consequentially, clears the way for Iran to resume oil sales. The nuclear questions that started the war are intended to be addressed over the next two months. What Tehran gets now is a reprieve, a free hand to crush dissent at home, a nuclear program left intact for now and money. What Tehran will do with that money should concern us all.
Writing in the New York Post, Mark Dubowitz and Miad Maleki of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies argue that the regime’s trapped oil revenue, tens of billions of dollars piled up in foreign accounts it cannot freely repatriate, is the single most powerful non-military lever the West holds, and this deal begins to release it.
After the 2015 nuclear accord normalized Iran’s oil exports, Dubowitz notes, its military budget rose by roughly 90 per cent in the first year, and the windfall flowed onward to Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis. Money that reaches Tehran does not stay in Tehran. It funds the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the proxies the regime uses to project violence outward.
Canadians have reason to watch where that violence lands. On June 11, Const. Marc Pinizzotto, a 43-year-old member of the Toronto Police Service’s Emergency Task Force, was shot and killed while executing a search warrant. The raid was part of an investigation into the March shooting at the U.S. consulate in Toronto and a wider series of attacks across the region, including shootings at synagogues.
American prosecutors have charged Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi, an Iraqi national they describe as a senior figure in Kata’ib Hizballah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with terrorism offences, including an alleged plot to attack a Manhattan synagogue. The complaint also accuses him of co-ordinating two attacks in Canada, carried out in the name of a Kata’ib Hizballah front group.
In a recorded call cited by the FBI, Al-Saadi allegedly boasted that his “people” were behind attacks in Canada. These remain allegations, and the courts will test them. But the shape of it is clear enough. This is increasingly how Iran fights — not by sending its own operatives, but by hiring local criminals to do its dirty work.
Toronto’s police chief has described a network of “criminals for hire,” in which young people are recruited through encrypted apps such as Signal and Telegram, paid modest sums and required to film their attacks, using U.S.-sourced handguns that have been passed between shooters and tied to 27 shootings throughout the region. The method buys the regime deniability and a steady supply of disposable labour, and it blurs the line between ordinary street crime and state-directed terror.
That is the backdrop against which Canada must handle the case of Pinizzotto’s killing. Those who pulled the trigger must face the full weight of the criminal law. But the charges against the shooters cannot be the end of it, and to their credit, the police have said as much. “Who’s paying for this?” Toronto police chief Myron Demkiw asked. Investigators say they are working to identify not only the people who pulled the triggers but those who directed and organized the attacks.
Garry Clement — a former RCMP officer who spent decades investigating organized crime, money laundering and terrorist financing — has warned that organized crime and hostile states increasingly work in the same marketplace, sharing financiers, launderers and foot soldiers, and that Canada keeps arresting the expendable while the architects and their money go untouched.
Arresting one shooter at a time disrupts incidents, but it does not dismantle the network behind them. Doing that would require stronger anti-money laundering enforcement, closer attention to where organized crime and state-sponsored terror overlap and a way to prosecute a whole criminal enterprise rather than only its most expendable members, as American racketeering laws allow.
The harder target has always been the state that directs or pays for the violence. That is the gap Parliament tried to close in 2012 with the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act (JVTA), which created a civil cause of action that allows victims and their families to sue the states that sponsor terrorism.
Iran is already a listed sponsor of terrorism. Canadian courts have held Tehran liable for shooting down Flight PS752, awarding the families more than $200 million across two judgments. Collecting on such awards is its own difficult problem. But the JVTA puts the sponsor’s name before a Canadian court, attaches a price to its conduct and places the power to act in the hands of the people it has harmed.
All of this bears on a question Canada may soon face again. Ottawa has had no diplomatic relations with Tehran since 2012, and Iran has said that it is ready to talk but that Canada should make the first move. The normalization forming around the American deal may revive that invitation — and leave Ottawa weighing whether to restore relations and reopen the Iranian embassy. It should not.
As recently as February, Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand set the condition plainly: no restored relations “unless there is a regime change. Period.” There has been none. The American deal shifts Washington’s posture, not Tehran’s conduct. Yet on Friday, Prime Minister Mark Carney said that not having an embassy in Iran puts Canada at “a disadvantage.”
That would mean reopening the Iranian embassy, which carries its own danger. Iran has a documented record of running terror and surveillance operations out of its diplomatic missions: in 2021 a Belgian court sentenced an accredited Iranian diplomat to 20 years for masterminding a plot to bomb an opposition rally near Paris, using explosives he had carried from Tehran in his diplomatic bag.
Iranian-Canadians have long warned that Tehran’s missions serve less as consulates than as bases for monitoring and intimidating the diaspora. To reopen one now would hand the regime back that platform.
And it would do so against everything happening here at home. On Canadian soil alone, a police officer is dead, Jewish-Canadians targeted and Iranian dissidents threatened, in investigations that allegedly lead back to Tehran. Whatever reprieve Washington extends, Canada should hold the line.
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. Saperia and Parsons are the principals of Pearl Strategic Counsel.
