Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree faced pointed questions Tuesday about why the federal government has deported one Iranian official, despite longstanding concerns about how the regime operates in Canada and abroad.

Finding himself in the hot seat before a parliamentary committee, Anandasangaree said Canada is “aggressively trying to remove” members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — a branch of Iran’s military that Canada listed as a terrorist entity under the Criminal Code in 2024 — but said due process has to be followed.

The Liberal government has long faced pressure from diaspora groups and the Opposition about its treatment of former IRGC officials. That pressure has only grown since the United States and Israel’s war with Iran began last month.

“There are far too many of them. You have deported one. That’s it,” Conservative Frank Caputo put to the minister during a meeting of the standing committee on public safety and national security.

“I want to know how many terrorists are there in Canada.”

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  • Scotty@scribe.disroot.orgOP
    3·
    17 hours ago

    Are Iranian ‘sleeper cells’ a threat to Canadians? Here’s what intelligence experts say

    … Anxiety around sleeper cells tends to resurface whenever tensions escalate between the U.S. and Iran. But one Canadian security expert says their deployment is not the modus operandi of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Canada … [diirector of the national security program at the University of Ottawa’s Professional Development Institute Dan] Stanton, who worked with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) for more than 30 years, says the actual threat lies in Tehran’s use of local criminal networks for targeted intimidation and violence.

    “They don’t use sleeper cells in that sense of deep cover agents. They use what we would call criminal proxies. These are people that would do surveillance, harass people or try to kill people.”

    … Thomas Juneau, who teaches at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, says the IRGC targets the families of Iranian dissidents as a way to punish or silence them. “There have been multiple documented cases … parents, siblings, close friends, other family members who are still in Iran who will be aggressively interrogated by intelligence services,” said Juneau.

    “And in more extreme cases, [they] will be physically beaten, tortured or [suffer] other kinds of negative consequences, such as financial assets frozen, careers suspended, jobs lost.”