We’re paying price for shuttering Tehran embassy
On Wednesday, 57 Canadians were innocent victims of the Iranian air disaster, caught in the crossfire of warmongering over the past year.
But in the days since, Canada has suffered from disastrous decisions of its own making, boxed in by our undiplomatic manoeuvring of the past eight years.
Without a Canadian Embassy in place on the ground in Tehran, we have been caught out of position and out of country. Our team of rapid-response diplomats had to cool its heels awaiting visas — first assembling in Ottawa, then holding in Turkey, awaiting onward connections to Tehran until the paperwork cleared.
Had our envoys been in place at the time of the downing, they could have deployed from our embassy directly to the crash site, using every means at their (diplomatic) disposal to protect Canadian interests: First, arranging emergency treatment for any injured had there been any survivors; second, securing the bodies of the dead for transport and burial without delay; third, documenting any evidence pointing to the causes; fourth, demanding on the scene that Canadian national and humanitarian interests be respected in the highly fraught investigation, notably in handling the “black box” that holds important clues.
This isn’t the way other countries have handled Iran, or responded to the deaths. Instead of having a head start on the other side of the world, so crucial to any country’s foreign service, our diplomats were a world away.
At a time of national mourning, it might seem beside the point — or even pointless — to question why our foreign policy apparatus was missing in action for one of the greatest single Canadian diplomatic and consular challenges of recent years. Amid the grieving, however, our self-imposed isolation from Iran has only exacerbated the suffering of the surviving families in Canada, which surely qualifies it as a foreign policy failure worth figuring out, if only for the future.
To be sure, a functioning Canadian Embassy in Iran would not have spared the lives of anyone. But a diplomatic presence might have eased the pain of their deaths for the surviving families, not least by hastening the identification and repatriation of bodies.
No one could have predicted such a disaster. And yet closing our embassy was an accident waiting to happen because it was only a matter of time until Canadians would be in need.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been a cauldron for decades, sitting on political flashpoints and geological fault lines — from the 1979 U.S. Embassy hostage crisis to the killing of Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi in 2003, not to mention major earthquakes that can cause untold human casualties at any moment (one of which I covered years ago).
We closed our embassy in Tehran with good reason after then-ambassador Ken Taylor put himself in harm’s way by helping to “exfiltrate” U.S. diplomats during the hostage crisis. But we never severed formal diplomatic relations, nor did we prevent Iranian diplomats from using their embassy in Ottawa in the years that followed.
Keeping that formal bilateral channel open helped us reopen our embassy a decade later, which in turn opened the door to a flood of talented Iranian immigrants to Canada numbering 300,000 people today.
Why then did we close our embassy and go one step further by also cutting off diplomatic relations in 2012? Stephen Harper’s Conservative government cited a grab bag of concerns, from human rights violations to its nuclear program and security concerns that politicized the issues.
Why didn’t Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government reverse course when he became prime minister? Trudeau told the Star’s editorial board in 2015 that he would re-examine the decision, but he never resumed relations nor reopened the embassy.
Michel de Salaberry served as Canada’s ambassador to Iran in the late 1990s when I was based in the Middle East for the Star, and who subsequently returned as charge d’affaires in times of tension. He told me it made sense to close the embassy for a period in 2012 after the British Embassy briefly came under attack, but not to sever all diplomatic ties.
The British have long since returned, and have maintained formal diplomatic ties. So have other western countries.
De Salaberry believes the embassy should have been reopened long ago, but domestic political considerations constrained Trudeau. The Harper government boxed him in with legislation that permitted potentially enormous lawsuits against Iran — a roadblock to re-establishing bilateral ties, and a delicate matter for Trudeau to reverse.
Now we are more isolated than most. Germany and Sweden also suffered casualties in the crash, but their diplomats on the ground were able to move in swiftly to protect consular and humanitarian interests.
Others understand that diplomatic relations are never an endorsement of international lawlessness, merely an instrument to protect national interests and defend dual nationals. We cannot afford to cut ourselves off for years at a time, no matter how frustrated.
It is a lesson worth remembering when it comes to China — a country that has effectively taken one of our diplomats hostage and ransomed our farm exports over the Huawei affair. The Iran debacle reminds us that diplomatic relations are not merely for friendly countries in good times, but most especially for difficult countries in bad times.