Thank you very much for the offer to speak to you today.
I am in the process of writing and researching a book on transnational repression in Canada with my co-author, Professor Amarnath Amarasingam, from Queen's University. The book will focus on how China, India and Iran target diaspora activists in Canada. We've conducted about 100 interviews so far, the vast majority with victims of transnational repression, or TNR. It will be the first comprehensive assessment of the threat and the problem in Canada. What I will discuss today are preliminary results. We expect to finish the writing of the manuscript by the end of the summer.
There are four main elements to our research: tools, impact, how victims perceive the government's response and the importance of understanding diaspora politics.
Our interviews, first, asked victims to describe the tools that state perpetrators of transnational repression use against them. The main tools are physical threats in Canada: surveillance, monitoring of protests, verbal abuse and, in extreme cases, physical violence and assassination attempts.
Much transnational repression occurs digitally—intimidation online, disinformation and defamation—with the goal of draining the activist's energy to sow doubt in others' minds about their honesty or integrity. Many of the worst instances of TNR have involved threats to and pressure on families inside the perpetrator country: interrogations, physical abuse, freezing of financial assets, firings from jobs and expulsions from university or education. We've documented multiple cases of each of these instances.
There is a heavy gendered aspect to transnational repression. Women activists are often victims of especially brutal and violent threats, notably in terms of disinformation and defamation online.
One element that matters a lot here is perception. We spoke to some activists, for example, who have not been directly targeted but who know of colleagues who were. The simple fear that there is a possibility they could be targeted in the future because of their activism is more than enough to send a chilling message. Transnational repression, in a sense, works a bit like terrorism. There is a theatrical element whereby the public display of visible instances of violence, physical or digital, serves to intimidate a given population.
Second, we try to assess the impact of transnational repression on diaspora activism itself. The impact varies a lot. We've spoken to people on whom there was no impact at all. They decided to continue their activism despite the threats or the violence. We've spoken to activists who decided to completely stop, and anybody in the middle. The most important variable in shaping the response or impact is whether the activist has family inside the perpetrator country. Those with no immediate family were typically more likely to continue.
We are also asking our interviewees—close to 100 of them—about the personal impact. Here we saw, universally, tremendous personal distress, with many activists reporting excessive emotional suffering as a result of the pressure they're under, and in most cases there's little or no support.
Third, we asked interviewees about their perceptions of the government's response to transnational repression. We systematically asked in particular whether they had contacted the RCMP, CSIS or other police of jurisdiction, and if yes, what responses they received, and if no, why not. Again, responses varied a lot at this level. In many cases, the main criticism was one of neglect—the perception that authorities have limited awareness and interest in the threat. Another frequent response was a perception that officials, in the police in particular, had very little awareness or understanding of the threat. That being said, there was also a fairly clear perception among our interviewees that the government is taking the problem increasingly seriously. I'll get back to that at the end.
Finally, our research has also shown the importance of understanding the broader context of diaspora politics, and more specifically, among other implications, how fragmented communities—this is the case in particular of the Iranian Canadian community, which I study a lot—create more opportunities for state perpetrators of transnational repression to target individuals and also make the job of the federal government to counter transnational repression more difficult—in terms of reaching out, for example.
Another element of our research has been to understand the government's response. What I would briefly say here is that the response has improved, but much remains to be done. There is better awareness in government of the threat, a better understanding of the portfolio of tools used by perpetrators of transnational repression and a better understanding of the impact not only on individuals but also on the broader fabric of Canadian society.
The federal government has developed new tools—for example, Canada's national counter foreign interference coordinator and some of the tools that came with Bill C-70—and it is steadily learning how to better use these tools. There's better information sharing not only within the federal government, but also between the federal government and other levels of government. There have also been efforts to be more transparent and to engage with diaspora communities.
To conclude very quickly, I will just add a point I made in an op-ed in the National Post about a month ago. We can expect transnational repression against Iranian Canadians to get significantly worse in 2026. Past patterns show that when two variables are met—enhanced diaspora mobilization and more acute perceptions of vulnerability by the regime—there's an increase in the targeting of diaspora activists. That is exactly what we're seeing in the Iranian case now. The tragic assessment is that we should expect things to get worse at that level in the coming months.