Foreign Affairs Committee on June 5th, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

Thank you very much, Mr. Sinclair.

We next go to MP Zarrillo.

MP Zarrillo, you have six minutes.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

I want to say congratulations to Ambassador Bennett.

Many years ago, when I was at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, they said that only 19% of diplomats across the world were women. I think that's been raised to about 20.5% right now. We know that Canada is at a much higher percentage, at 35% or more, so I want to congratulate you for that. Especially at this time, when we see so much unrest across the globe, we know that we need more women at the peacekeeping table. I just wanted to say congratulations on behalf of the NDP.

You made some comments about reconciliation. What role does the Canadian embassy in Denmark play in respecting and advancing reconciliation in Nunavut, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador? How do you see that?

[Carolyn Bennett]

Thanks for that. We're at 50% women ambassadors, actually, or heads of missions, so we're pretty excited by that.

In terms of what we've been trying to do in Denmark, we have set up four meetings on Arctic perspectives. We were pleased at the one we held last month. Natan Obed was one of the panellists, as was Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, who chairs the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation as the chair in reconciliation at Lakehead University. They were very, very well received.

I think this becomes very important, as Canada is able to set an example and particularly focus on the relationship with Inuit, and on Inuit mobility. Hopefully, with the new flight that will go from Nuuk to Iqaluit and then down, and then hopefully over to northern Quebec in Kuujjuaq, there's a real example of “nothing about us without us”, and being able to show that we know that it's a journey, not a destination, and it's not scary. These relationships are ones in which we learn a great deal.

I know that with the Arctic parliamentary meeting recently in the Nordics, your colleague Lori Idlout was a bit worried about the way things were being framed in terms of indigenous rights. I think as parliamentarians we all need to come together and work with that kind of reconciliation across the world, and also know that those indigenous peoples that you've identified in Canada, and their working nation to nation, will be hugely important as we put forward their voices.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Ambassador.

That goes to my next question. How are Canada and the Kingdom of Denmark working together alongside indigenous people in regard to economic bilateral co-operation and respecting indigenous rights and their way of life?

I'll add to that, because you just mentioned the flights. You might know that my colleague Lori Idlout was up today talking about the exorbitant price of flights and how it really is restrictive. It's not economic equality. It really isn't allowing for the free movement of people—not goods, but definitely not people—at that price.

Maybe you could share some thoughts on that.

[Carolyn Bennett]

I think we all have a concern about the flights where, at the moment, because of the costs, certain people would find it easier to go back to Copenhagen and come back than actually deal with these new routes. We have to deal with that.

I think we can deal with it also in terms of ways to support, whether it be sports teams or music groups, youth exchanges—there is actually an agreement between Denmark and Canada—and youth mobility. How do we buttress the success of these flights, and then how do we work together to get those prices down?

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

I would just ask you to stay close to MP Idlout and have some conversations with her on that as soon as possible, if you can. It's so important that we have free movement of people and goods and that indigenous people have their rights respected and their economic independence.

[Carolyn Bennett]

Yes. That was one of the first calls I made. Before I presented my credentials, I spoke to some of the northern senators, obviously premiers, and the heads of national indigenous organizations, such as Natan. We want to know what their view is on Inuit mobility, which is a really important thing. Lori talked to me about her constituents in Pond Inlet, who have relatives across in Greenland. How do we get them to move back and forth, even before their travel documents or...? I think what Natan had said was how do we just have a place-keeper to make sure we honour this commitment that we've made on Inuit mobility? We can't prescribe what Greenland does about their definition of the people who would qualify as opposed to us here in Canada, who have those kinds of formal registries.

It's a challenge. We know that we can do it by listening to the people affected by the policies. That's the only way you get good policy.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Great. I hope you raise the voice of MP Idlout and her constituents about having the ability to get passports quickly. If you can assist with that, even, in regard to Greenland, that's very important to her residents and an issue that she has brought to the House.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

Thank you. We're now 30 seconds over.

Allow me to conclude the questions by thanking you, Madam Ambassador, for your lengthy years of public service. I know that I speak on behalf of all the members here when I wish you continued success in the years ahead representing our country.

Thank you for that.

[Carolyn Bennett]

Come and visit.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

Absolutely.

Given the time constraints, we will suspend for literally two to three minutes, no more.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

Welcome back, everyone.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Thursday, February 16, 2023, the committee will resume its study of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the current situation in Iran.

I would now like to welcome our three distinguished witnesses. We have here, in person, Professor Noomane Raboudi from the University of Ottawa. We also have, here in person, Mr. Shahram Kholdi from Kiaxar Inc., who is a Middle East specialist. Virtually, we have joining us, from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Mr. Behnam Taleblu, who is a senior fellow.

After we've heard from all three of the witnesses, again because of time constraints, there will be five-minute rounds of questioning—five minutes only—so we can get out of here by approximately 6:35.

We will start with Professor Raboudi.

The floor is yours. You have five minutes.

[Noomane Raboudi, Assistant Professor, University of Ottawa, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for your invitation.

I'll start with a brief introduction. When I speak about the Middle East, it's often—as you know—about controversial topics. This can convey an image that isn't mine. I want to make it clear from the start that I have absolutely no sympathy for the Iranian regime, let alone for the violent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. However, I'm also fully aware that I'll likely say some things that go against the grain. Of course, I won't do so for ideological reasons, but for the benefit of Canada and—since I've been invited as a professor—of the people here who want to make the most of my expertise.

I want to say that five minutes isn't enough time to talk about everything. I'll simply talk about the issue of placing the IRGC on the list of terrorist entities. Let me be clear about this. Under the current circumstances, this isn't a good idea. I'll tell you why.

First, this discussion must take place in a non‑ideological context. The international news over the past 30 years has provided clear evidence of the devastating impact of building international and foreign policy choices on predetermined ideologies that lack any connection with the reality of the international situation. This is particularly true for the Middle East, which has both contradicted these ideologies and challenged them. The Islamic State terrorist group was the direct result of this logic, which must be avoided at all costs.

We need to learn from history and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. The IRGC is certainly one destabilizing force in the Middle East. However, it's only one of many and no less dangerous. This type of selective decision will certainly undermine the relatively neutral and moderate position that Canada seeks and, in my opinion, should maintain in the Middle East. It could certainly prevent Canada from playing a mediating role in the endless conflicts taking place in this region, particularly given the total failure of American policies. In the opinion of most experts in this region, including American experts, these policies have been thoroughly discredited.

You need an idea of the risk. You need to determine the potential danger of manipulating such a dangerous topic for political gain. We're fully aware that ideological tendencies in our political life seek to align Canadian foreign policies in the Middle East with the American policies. It seems that this choice is purely ideological and devoid of any strategic vision. Moreover, it poses a real danger to our interests in the world and to our national security.

In doing so, we'll be taking sides in deeply rooted identity conflicts. These conflicts are compounded by historical, colonial, political, religious, denominational and territorial disputes that remain virtually unresolvable. The extreme complexity of these conflicts makes it difficult to take a fair and balanced stance, at an equal distance from all the antagonists involved.

In addition to pointlessly intervening in these conflicts, we're also likely to invite them here. This type of invitation could significantly affect our social peace and internal security. The terrible tragedy currently unfolding in Gaza confirms that Canadian society is deeply and uniquely divided on the issues in the Middle East. Governments often adopt definitions of terrorism that enable them to serve their interests; enforce their vision; take unpopular or even freedom‑destroying measures at times; delegitimize the actions of their enemies; and impose measures that depend on the circumstances faced.

For example, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service defines terrorism as the threat or perpetration of serious acts of violence to compel the Canadian government to act in a certain way—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

I apologize for interrupting, Professor Raboudi. We've now hit the five-minute mark. Could I ask you to conclude your remarks in the next 20 seconds or so?

[Noomane Raboudi]

I just wanted to say that the IRGC is certainly the repressive arm of the Iranian government, obviously one of the most detestable and abhorrent dictatorships in the world. However, given the borderline inflammatory climate in the Middle East and the level of hatred that unfortunately prevails in the Muslim world, it doesn't seem like a good idea to make this type of decision under the current circumstances.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

Thank you very much, Professor.

We'll now turn to Professor Kholdi. You also have five minutes for your opening remarks.

The floor is yours.

[Dr. Shahram Kholdi, Middle East Specialist, Kiaxar Inc.]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Honourable members of the committee, I would like to thank the committee for this opportunity and for your hard work on this critical matter over the past two years.

For your purview, I've enclosed in my submission notes several of my written analytical pieces on Iran International in English that discuss the activities of the IRGC. My submission today is divided into historical background, recent developments and summation.

From the 1960s onwards, Shia fanatical Iranian urban guerrillas plotted and staged several successful terror attacks against the Iranian imperial state officials. These guerrillas received training in urban warfare and assassination from armed Palestinian organizations, with the financial backing of Nasser's Egypt, the Baathist regimes of Iraq and Syria, and Gaddafi of Libya. They also worked with security services of several Soviet bloc states, including communist East Germany and Maoist China.

Most importantly, this network trafficked arms and hard currency and collaborated with armed insurgents from Southeast Asia to the Irish Republican Army in that period. After the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979, the very members of these guerrillas founded the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

In the interest of time, I will be skipping some paragraphs of my brief.

I studied law in Iran. I would be grateful to bring it to your attention that per article 150 of the Islamic Republic of Iran's constitution, the IRGC is officially enshrined. It is not accountable before anyone but the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic. It is unimpeachable by the ostensibly elected parliament of the Islamic Republic.

In the 1980s, the IRGC was integral in the brutal suppression of Iranian political dissidents. It actually staged several coup attempts against Persian Gulf monarchies in that region. The opportunity for it to create the first Iranian armed proxy, and perhaps the foremost one, was the Hezbollah of Lebanon in the aftermath of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in the same period.

Per recent developments, since the 1990s, the IRGC has been a major force in Iran's postwar economy. It has evolved into a large construction racket, whose Khatam al-Anbiya headquarters and its consulting engineering companies were assigned multi-billion dollar dam, petrochemical and transportation projects. IRGC's special Quds Force has been instrumental in the military-calibre brutal suppression of the Iranian people's recurring uprisings over the past 15 years, chiefly the suppression of the autumn 2022 Women, Life, Freedom uprising.

Since 2015 the IRGC has built up a criminal network in collaboration with Mexican and South American drug cartels, and has been very active in the dark web, cryptocurrency transactions and other international money-laundering operations that use various front enterprises from the gulf region and Southeast Asia to Latin America, the U.S. and here, Canada.

Since 2022 IRGC's military industrial complex has supplied the Russian war machine with tens of thousands of technologically sophisticated, and some not-so-sophisticated, projectiles of various types.

I will again skip some paragraphs.

The IRGC has been instrumental in creating the present state of instability in the Middle East by creating the Houthis of Yemen à la Hezbollah framework. I cannot adequately underscore the involvement of the IRGC in international criminal activity and the threat it poses to all Canadians, especially Iranian Canadians.

I also cannot sufficiently emphasize the involvement of the IRGC, directly or indirectly, in recruiting the Hezbollah of Lebanon, Canadian Hells Angels and other transnational gangster networks to plot attacks against Jewish religious and cultural centres as well as Iranian dissidents across the world.

I must add here, as a note, that the IRGC is also implicated in crimes against humanity against half a million civilian Syrians, basically massacring them, and the displacement of about two million Syrians in conjunction and confederation with the Hezbollah during the civil war in defence of the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad.

It has been claimed that listing the IRGC as a terrorist entity is fraught with various legal and political problems. Even Josep Borrell, the outgoing EU foreign policy chief, has stated as much: that without judicially valid evidence, one cannot risk listing IRGC as a terrorist organization. I beg to differ. Historical evidence, contemporary occurrences as well as several occurrences of terrorist activities dating back over the past 30 years, as established by European courts, confirm that IRGC is a sponsor of terrorism in the west, and it's a threat toward peace and Canada's security as well as to our transatlantic alliance.

Thank you very much for this opportunity.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

Thank you very much, Dr. Kholdi.

We next go to Mr. Taleblu, who's joining us virtually.

Welcome, Mr. Taleblu. The floor is yours. You have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Behnam Taleblu, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies]

Chairman, vice-chairmen and distinguished members of the committee, thank you for providing me the opportunity to testify virtually before you today and to share my analysis.

My comments today begin broad and then zoom in and come at a particularly turbulent time in Iran that may be hard to understand for external observers and non-Iran watchers.

Recently the country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, died in a helicopter crash in northwestern Iran. Despite Iranian drones now being found in conflict zones in at least four continents, it was reportedly a Turkish drone that found the crash site first. Elsewhere, in normal countries, an accident of this scale would elicit national mourning and popular sorrow. Yet in Iran and across Persian-language social media, news of the president’s passing was treated with felicitation, jubilation and even jokes by large swaths of society.

Indeed, there is nothing normal about the massive chasm that exists today between state and society in Iran. That's because the Islamic Republic of Iran is an Islamist and authoritarian regime that sits atop and represses a secular nationalist and democracy-seeking people.

While snap “elections” or more aptly put, “selections” are scheduled for later this June, those are expected to be boycotted en masse, just as parliamentary elections were a few months ago. Since the outbreak of nationwide anti-regime protests beginning in 2017, rising protests have meant record-setting low turnouts, even when we look at official regime statistics.

Indeed for a regime with as little social legitimacy as the Islamic Republic, exogenous shocks like snap elections or accidents involving major political figures can be ill afforded given that the Iranian population has used nearly every opportunity, including crises, whether they are social, economic, environmental or even related to foreign policy, as opportunities to protest and to make their case that the state does not represent the street and that they are done with incremental reform and are seeking wholesale political change.

This desire for wholesale political change caught the eyes and ears of members of this distinguished body from 2022-23 during the height of the “Woman, Life, Freedom.” or “Zan. Zendegi. Azadi.” movement, at the peak of which anti-regime protests rocked over 150 different cities, towns and villages across all of Iran’s 30 provinces.

One of the elements in the cocktail of security forces instrumental in repressing those protests was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC is a parallel ideological military created in the early days of the Islamic Revolution as a check against the national military. Tasked with defending the integrity of the “revolution,” this force and its veterans, affiliates and supporters now constitute the single most important institution in contemporary Iran. It is the tip of the spear of the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism today and the hub and its spoke of transnational terrorism and repression.

For almost two decades now, the dominant trend in the discourse among regime elites in Iran who support the IRGC has been to frame its network abroad as an anti-status quo “axis of resistance”, constituting proxies and partners around the Middle East who were either created, like the Badr in Iraq or Hezbollah in Lebanon, or co-opted, like the Houthis in Yemen or Hamas in Gaza.

Nonetheless, the IRGC trains, equips, supports and underwrites these terror militias in its axis with state-level capabilities, as has been the case with the Houthis in Yemen since 2015.

This group, which is the latest to join the axis of resistance, is now in possession of medium-range ballistic missiles and anti-ship ballistic missiles. To date, it is the only proxy of Iran to have paraded and used these capabilities. Elsewhere it helps to work with those proxies to indigenously produce weapons, as has been the case with Iran and Hamas since 2014.

Since the Iran-backed terrorist attack against Israel by Hamas on October 7, the IRGC has been bringing more of its terrorist apparatus online, employing a “ring of fire” strategy so as to escalate the Gaza war into a regional conflict and prevent a member of its axis from being militarily taken off the chessboard.

While these proxies in the region have traditionally been used by the IRGC to mask its hand in foreign conflicts, today they are calling cards or tells of the regime’s regional enmeshment and growing capabilities and risk tolerance.

While the IRGC has helped Tehran engage in internal suppression and external aggression, its increasing role offers the distinguished members of this body, North American policy-makers and, in reality, all Five Eyes nations, the opportunity to course-correct their Iran policies.

In my view, every single Five Eyes country ought to, under their own national counterterrorist authorities, be designating the IRGC a terrorist organization in its entirety. I'd be happy to explain why, along with the benefits of this approach, in the Q and A.

Every single Five Eyes country also ought to be using this time to push for anti-corruption or Magnitsky-style penalties against the supreme leader of Iran and his inner circle and taking the opportunity to align other sovereign sanctions regimes, whether they be nuclear, missile, drone, Russia, or human rights related.

After all, the IRGC is proliferating drones to Russia for use in Ukraine, escalating Iran's nuclear program, engaging in more overt ballistic missile activity to include strikes and attacks in four nations during the first four months of 2024 alone, and stepping up its internal crackdown against dissidents inside the country. The predicate for more multilateral action today exists.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

Mr. Taleblu, could I ask you to wrap it up in the next 10 to 15 seconds, please?

[Behnam Taleblu]

Sure.

The main question is this: Does the west have the commensurate resolve to act to contest these threats and better marry its head and its heart on Iran policy?

Thank you for the time and the opportunity.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ali Ehsassi]

Thank you very much for that.

Looking at the clock and at the commitments the members have, each round will be four minutes.

We will start off with MP Aboultaif.

You have four minutes, sir.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Thanks, Chair.

Thanks to the witnesses and welcome to the committee.

I'll start with Professor Kholdi.

We know that the network of the IRGC in Canada is quite big. It's branched in different shapes, from money laundering to smuggling to weapons to drugs to everything. We know that's to feed back illegal cash to the regime. This illegal operation has been going for years in Canada.

Is calling for or recognizing the IRGC as a terrorist organization the first serious step to start fighting their existence in Canada—yes or no?

[Dr. Shahram Kholdi]

Yes. Absolutely.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Do you have any idea of the size of the money laundering and the network or how many people they could have on Canadian soil? We know that in the Middle East they've done it with Yemen, with Lebanon, with Syria, with Iraq. They're everywhere. I'm afraid they have the same model in Canada and maybe of course in other nations. How much information do we have on this organization and their activities in Canada?