Police-state compradors and corporate collaborators have had the run of this country for years. Is Canada already too far gone?

Related: Is it too late for the Iranian people to shake off their tormentors without risk of a Syria-scale national catastrophe?

It’s a question that comes up a lot. Just how deeply has Canada’s political class become compromised by its intimate and lucrative relationships with individuals and entities affiliated with torture states like Xi Jinping’s China and Ali Khamenei’s Iran? Is it too late to turn things around?

I really don’t know. I’m turning to Real Story subscribers for a hand with this. Let me know what you think, in comments at the bottom of this post (for paid subscribers only). Something to occupy your time this Thanksgiving Day weekend.

For now, read on.

Tens of thousands of Canadians who fled Iran over the years expecting to find safe harbour here have discovered that instead, they must live in dread. They’ve been saying so for years: the regime they ran from already has its well-to-do agents of influence here, comfortably entrenched in circles of power and influence in this country.

For years and years they’ve been saying this.

It’s going to take massive intervention to root out the rot, and it won’t be pretty. It will certainly take a great deal more than the travel bans imposed on roughly 10,000 senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers and the threat of asset freezes that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Friday.

“It was meant to seem like they are doing something which they are not doing,” as Kaveh Shahrooz, the tireless Iranian-Canadian human rights campaigner, put it.

It has taken a country-wide revolution in Iran, an unprecedented mobilization of Canada’s Iranian diaspora and the passionate support of Canadians from all walks of life just to get this far. And as Shahrooz says, it’s really not that far at all.

One of dozens of Iran solidarity rallies across Canada, this one at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

For years, Iranian-Canadians have been pleading with Ottawa to list the IRGC as a terrorist organization, as the U.S. State Department does. Prime Minister Trudeau himself voted in favour of an Opposition motion four years ago to designate the IRGC under Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act. But he hasn’t, he didn’t do anything of the kind on Friday, he won’t, and he can’t explain why.

Keeping members of the IRGC’s top echelons out of Canada sounds all well and good. The problem is, the IRGC’s agents and enforcers are already here, and they routinely spy on, harrass and threaten Iranian Canadians, as Toronto’s Maryam Shafipour explained to me only a few days ago. “They know every detail of my life in Canada,” Shafipour learned from her sister back in Iran. “They know even the view from my apartment window.”

This is from six years ago, in Vancouver: “Iranian-Canadians are afraid to criticize their homeland’s autocratic leadership because, when either themselves or family members return to Iran, they don’t want to be questioned, have their passports confiscated or be tossed in jail.”

Last Tuesday, the Iranian-Canadians protesting on Parliament Hill were not chanting “Don’t let them in.” They were chanting: “Kick them out.”

This past week marked the 1,000th day since the IRGC shot Flight PS752 out of the skies above Tehran, killing 176 people, including 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents. In Canada, IRGC agents can still come and go as the please. The Canadian Security and Intelligence Service is well aware of the IRGC’s network in Canada. As a former member of the RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team told me: “Yes. They are here.”

Sometimes I do think it’s too late. Later on in this newsletter I’ll set out the case that we may be past the point of no return, owing to a deft sleight-of-hand manouvre Team Trudeau pulled off, unnoticed, although in plain sight, during his first innings in power.

A brief digression: What’s happening in Iran?

Turning for a moment to that subsidiary question, about the prospects for an Iranian revolution: that was the subject of my column this week in the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. I regret to say I found it difficult to summon my ordinarily cheery optimism. Neither could I summon much optimism from my friend Kamran Malekpour, a senior finance and economics journalist in Iran before making his way to Canada a decade ago. But the question is still open: Is this the beginning of the end of Iran's theocratic regime?

It’s been three weeks since the people of Iran rose up in rage following the killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was arrested by Iran’s hated Morality Police. Popular revulsion with the regime was the kindling for a bonfire of a rebellion more widespread and inspiring than anything we’ve seen in anti-Khomeinist uprisings going back decades.

In the pro-democracy camp, signs of exhaustion are setting in, while the mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are giving every indication of digging in. You shouldn’t need to be reminded what stasis of precisely this kind produced in the Khomeinist satrapy of Bashar Assad’s Syria. Assad’s torture chambers and barrel bombers, backed by the IRGC’s Quds Force and the Russian air force, turned Syria into a vastness of tombs and a hellscape of writhing agony.

Owing in no small measure to Barack Obama’s chemical-weapons “red-line” surrender and the hostage-taking the Khomeinist regime made of Obama’s catastrophic nuclear-rapprochement strategy, Syria’s democratic uprising was betrayed and Assad was allowed to turn a country of 22 million into a charnel house: nearly seven million refugees, another seven million “internally displaced,” nearly six million children currently subsisting on humanitarian aid for their basic survival, and 12 million suffering “food insecurity.”

There’s always hope, and the masses of Iranians returning to the streets day after day should leave us all with some hope. It’s too bad that U.S. President Joe Biden just can’t resist the urge to make Obama’s vanity project his own.

Back to the business about whether it’s too late for Canada

As for Canada, what is it going to take to put to rest the Trudeau government’s “sunny ways” legacy of accomodation, appeasement, and engagement with thug regimes like Ali Khamenei’s and Xi Jinping’s?

It will take a lot more than Friday’s promises to boost resources aimed at shutting down the money pipeline between the IRGC and Canadian bank accounts. Long-standing sanctions are already supposed to do that. They’re not.

It will take a lot more than Senator Leo Housakos’ proposed Foreign Agents Registry, which keeps getting bogged down thanks to Trudeau’s Beijing-friendly senators. And I’m not so sure the Conservatives have the mettle for the enormity of the task.

Although he got whooped last month by Pierre Poilievre, Jean Charest was a serious contender for the Conservative Party leadership. Quite a few Conservatives were perfectly prepared to overlook Charest’s $70,000-a-month services to Xi Jinping’s “national champion” Huawei telecom giant in its efforts to skirt around Canada’s national-security roadblocks. Charest has also been more than happy to serve as a human megaphone for Beijing’s disinformation operations.

The main reason I think it might be too late involves a weirdly overlooked-but-in-plain-sight legislative manouvre Justin Trudeau’s government made immediately after getting elected. Those were such heady days! Cash-for-access banquets for senior Liberal Party donors and Chinese billionaires, Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion’s enthusiasm for an open-arms approach to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, a reopening of Tehran’s spy nest of an embassy in Ottawa. . .

The manouvre I’m alluding to was openly debated at the time, and it was intended as a rebuke to those mean and xenophobic Harper Conservatives who had placed certain conditions on the acquisition and retention of Canadian citizenship. Among other things, Trudeau’s legislation - “A Canadian in a a Canadian is a Canadian!” - repealed a clause that stripped dual citizens of their Canadian status if they were convicted of terrorism, treason or espionage.

It seems to me that the manouvre effectively extends legal protection to Beijing-directed and Tehran-directed operatives doing their dirty work here in Canada: once they’re here, you can’t get get rid of them.

The move was stickhandled by none other than John McCallum - the cabinet minister who took it as a promotion when he was shifted to the job of Canada’s ambassador to China, and eventually had to be fired for so openly taking Beijing’s side in the squalid kidnapping of Michael Korvrig and Michael Spavor in retaliation for the detention of Hawei’s Meng Wanzhou on conspiracy and fraud charges in New York. Those charges, incidentally, related to her evasion of sanctions on the Khomeinist regime in Tehran.

Espionage. You can get away with it in Canada.

The overwhelming majority of Iranian-Canadians long for the emancipation of their people back in the old country. But as we have seen over and over again, the regime has its agents here in Canada, too. See here, and a lot more here.

Iran’s Foreign Affairs Ministry counts 400,000 Iranians in Canada (Iran doesn’t recognize dual citizenship) while Canada’s 2016 census counted more than 200,000 Iranian Canadians. It’s not known how many have renounced their Iranian citizenship. There are roughly 300,000 people in China, mostly in Hong Kong, with Canadian passports in their stock portfolios (sorry to put it so crudely). Hundreds of thousands of well-to-do people from China have emigrated to Canada in recent years, wholly eclipsing the Cantonese speaking people who were the backbone of the Chinese-Canadian community for generations.

Not a single Beijing-aligned individual or entity has been the subject of Canadian sanctions in response to the brutal obliteration of Hong Kong’s democratic aspirations and its United Nations status as a semi-independent, self-governing city state. Canada was worse than useless during Hong Kong’s recent democratic uprising and the ugly denouement of brutal repression. As I insist on reiterating, it’s not for nothing that Trudeau’s Liberal Party is knows as the political wing of the Canada-China Business Council.

For background, do read my contribution to the Post’s New World Disorder series this past week. It’s about democracy’s worsening worldwide suffocation - it’s lasted a generation, so far. It’s about how the rich and powerful in Washington and Ottawa, London and Berlin have aided and abetted in the dirty work of choking the life out of democratic militancy, pretty well the world round. But I do try to be optimistic that maybe the worm has turned. Here you go: The West's greedy and unholy bargain with dictatorships is unravelling.

For more immediately relevant context, here’s what Chief of Defence Staff General Wayne Eyre told the House of Commons standing committee on national security this week: “Russia and China are not just looking at regime survival but regime expansion. They consider themselves to be at war with the West. . . They strive to destroy the social cohesion of liberal democracies and the credibility of our own institutions to ensure our model of government is seen as a failure.”

It’s not as though the Kremlin’s disinformation operations or Beijing’s vast influence rackets in Canada need to rev up into overdrive to undermine public confidence in our democratic institutions. Just have a look at this exchange in the House of Commons Thursday between the Conservatives’ Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Michael Chong, and Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino:

The Post Millennial @TPostMillennial

Conservative MP Michael Chong says the Trudeau Liberals' priorities "are descending into farce" and calls them out for, among other things, allowing the Chinese Communist Party to operate police stations in Canada.

Chong: “Iranian officers freely come to this country to intimidate Canadians, because they won’t list the IRGC. . . Now we find out that police officers from the people’s republic of China are operating out of three offices illegally opened in Canada intimidating Canadians. So what is the government doing about these illegal police stations in Toronto?”

Mendicino: “We stand with the women” (and so on), then this: “It would be a fine moment for the Conservatives to stand up and apologize for the way in which they exploited technology to proliferate hate among anti-women mysogynstic groups.”

Seriously. That’s one hell of a shark-jumping diversion, but it’s working. It’s a story that’s utterly captivated the Parliamentary press gallery. Prime Minister Trudeau himself was banging on about it in the House of Commons this past week.

Apparently, some social-media nerd was posting Pierre Poilievre’s Youtube videos beginning four years ago with unseen hashtags, one of which was the acronym MGTOW, which refers to some deeply unfashionable loser trend a few years back that championed the idea of “Men Going Their Own Way,” because these men don’t like women, or because women don’t like them, or something.

I guess this is newsworthy in some way, even though the whole hullabaloo is so obviously about trying by hook or by connect-a-dot degrees of separation to service the wildly fashionable trend championing the idea that Poilievre is some dogwhistling deep-state secret agent of the neofascist right. Chris Selley seems to think the hubbub is a big deal for Poilievre, in a reputation-fixing kind of way. I haven’t the faintest idea.

Anyway, it’s all done tremendous service as a diversion from the rather more pressing subject of the deep reach of the Khomeinist regime’s IRGC in Canada, and the deeper reach of Beijing’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office in Canada.

It hasn’t mattered that a federal court has ruled that the Chinese government agency, ostensibly responsible for citizens living abroad and liaising with overseas Chinese communities, engages in acts of espionage that are “contrary to Canada’s interests”. The OCAO continues its work out in the open in Canada, without a care in the world.

The OCAO – which is part of the Communist Party of China’s United Front Work Department – had conducted “covert action and intelligence gathering against [overseas] Chinese communities and other minorities around the world”, according to the ruling.

You’d think it was the IRGC or something.

So, is it too late? You tell me.