Thomas Juneau is a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
Canada announced on June 19 that it is listing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Iranian regime’s praetorian guard, as a terrorist entity. The logic is appealing: the IRGC poses a threat to Canada, notably through the intimidation and bullying of Iranian-Canadian human-rights activists and of their families still in Iran. It is also clear, as Iranian-Canadian activists and academics have long warned, that the federal government has neglected this threat.
The optimal response to IRGC activities in Canada would be an effective one that targets those doing harm and best protects the victims. But listing the group as a terrorist entity will be complex and labour-intensive, as there are hundreds of thousands of current and former IRGC members, including conscripts. This is a serious problem: Canada already cannot fulfill its existing commitments to monitor and enforce the many sanctions it has announced, let alone sweeping new ones.
Activists often dismiss such concerns as arcane administrative issues that should not stand in the way of doing what is right. Yet in a reality of scarce resources, these constraints impose trade-offs that weaken potential action. IRGC activities in Canada represent a serious and neglected problem, but it is not the only threat that Canada faces; others include economic espionage, foreign interference, cybersecurity and extremism of various stripes. Sweeping measures, such as the listing of a large military force, are not optimal uses of scarce resources, in a context in which Canada’s national security agencies are already overstretched and under-resourced, and cannot keep up with a proliferation and intensification of threats.
Many independent experts agree that a combination of targeted sanctions – actually enforcing existing ones, while also adding individuals and specific entities to sanctions lists – would have been more effective. It would also have avoided the inevitable catching of innocents in what will be a blunt sanctions net, a problem that emerged in the United States after it listed the IRGC in 2019.
This raises a broader problem that exists in Canada: the frequent adoption of politically driven, knee-jerk decisions without serious investment in the necessary implementation capacity. This has long plagued national security, foreign and defence policy in this country.
The challenges in actually enforcing the IRGC listing in a context of personnel shortages, widespread recruitment, morale, and retention difficulties, security clearance backlogs, and chronic underfunding in the national security community provide only one of many examples. The Canadian Armed Forces are 16,000 troops short of their authorized level, despite years of efforts on the recruitment front. Making matters worse, to fulfill the commitments announced in the defence-policy update released in April, the Forces will require several thousands additional troops. Bill C-70, which received Royal Assent on June 21 and will lead to major reforms in the national security community, raises similarly difficult resource questions. The list of other examples is long.
This has important consequences. It irritates our allies, an increasingly serious problem that we underestimate. This is not a superficial concern: Canada has historically greatly benefitted from its security alliances and partnerships, such as NATO and the Five Eyes, but increasingly, multilateralism will be more flexible and ad hoc than it was in the past. Canada’s underwhelming ability to contribute to flexible “minilateral” groupings such as AUKUS damages its ability to leverage such partnerships. This neglect also sends a clear message to adversaries – such as Iran – that we are not serious about penalizing them.
This is the result of a deeply entrenched tendency to make reactive decisions which we cannot fully implement in the absence of a coherent strategy, too often in response to domestic political pressures and not as the result of a hard-headed assessment of the threat environment. In the absence of serious and sustained investments, any new initiative, reform, legislative change, or terrorist listing will suffer from a low ceiling for success because of limitations in implementation capacity. This is not sustainable.
For decades, comfortably perched on top of North America and far from the world’s problems, Canada could afford to neglect these issues. The luxury of a cost-free dilettante foreign policy, however, has come to an end.