Madam Chair, the Iranian regime is, as my colleague has said, a brutal dictatorship that is directly responsible for the death of Canadians, never mind countless Jewish people and others. It has engaged in a reign of terror over its own people. I think of Mahsa Amini and the women in Iran. This is a brutal dictatorship.
After much pressure from the Conservatives for years, the Liberal government finally designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization. The problem is that there has not been a lot of enforcement on what that means in terms of Iranian officials. These are people who are senior officials directly involved in human rights abuses. There has not been a lot of action taken by the Liberal government to deport the over 700 people we know are in the country who would fall under this category. In fact, today there is a significant Globe and Mail story, I believe it was, that showed that there was only one person who fit this category who was deported.
I would just say this. Today we had officials in front of our immigration committee and we asked them, essentially, why this was the case. These are reasons that were cited today: that there were no flights to Iran, that they needed to protect the privacy of Iranian regime officials and that there were pending asylum claims. That is bananas. The reality is that hundreds of senior Iranian officials who are complicit in human rights abuses have come to Canada and remain here, and the Liberal government is not really doing anything about it. The government is letting its officials just say, “Okay, this is fine.” The Liberals need to exert political will and say that things have to change.
The reality is that Canada is becoming an attractive destination for Iranian regime officials to flee because they know that lax screening procedures allow them to enter undetected, and even if they are detected, they are not going to be deported because they have endless appeal processes available to them. They can claim asylum, and there are loopholes in the laws and in the processes.
I would like to think that nobody in this place would like to see this continue to happen. What we saw today at our committee was one of the worst exercises in bureaucratic incompetence that I have seen in almost my entire tenure in this place. I will put it this way: If I were the immigration minister, I would have called all of these officials into my office, raked them over the coals and given them a plan on how to do better. Public safety is at stake and there are members of the Iranian diaspora in Canada who feel deeply unsafe.
We are not just opposing the Liberals' failed approach here. Conservatives are also proposing a constructive path forward. Today, the government, actually all members in this place, can do something material and concrete to oppose the Iranian regime with the strokes of a few pens. Conservatives will be provoking a debate in the immigration committee over the following motion, which we gave notice of today.
We would like the Liberals to undertake a comprehensive review of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act with an eye to modernize it to prevent Iranian regime officials from avoiding deportation by clearly ensuring that non-citizens who are deemed inadmissible, if they are involved in regime-linked businesses, spreading propaganda or human rights abuses, are deported. For example, an Iranian official was able to evade deportation, even though he ran a regime-funded propaganda distribution newspaper, even though he was a deputy general in the supreme leader's office in the U.A.E., and even though he held a senior position in the Friday imams policy propaganda, because he said he was not a cabinet minister, so he should be allowed to stay here. The law clearly needs to be updated and, frankly, shame on the IRB for allowing him to stay here.
We have other measures in here as well. One is to create an exemption for non-refoulement protections for Iranian regime officials who have been deemed inadmissible due to human rights abuses. We would also like the government to table, with Parliament, the identities of known Iranian regime officials who are currently present in Canada, especially those under deportation orders. These are common-sense measures that would keep Iranian diaspora and, frankly, all Canadians safe, and the government could do them today. It would be a way for Canada to strike a blow at the heart of the regime and to say, “No, Canada is not a safe destination for human rights abusers who have been involved in this regime.”
If we do not do this, I suspect that in a very short period of time, some prime minister will have to stand up and make an apology.
