When Iran Turns Canadian Streets Into Battlefields -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Iran is not exporting oil, drones or missiles anymore, its latest export is movies. It is fear.

There are also vehement threats against some foreign journalists as Brigadier General Abolfazl Shekarchi, a senior spokesperson of Iran’s armed forces announced in August 2026 that journalists working for Iran International, BBC Persian and Radio Farda could be taken into “the military target bank” of the Islamic Republic. He claimed, without evidence in public, that they worked for American and Israeli intelligence.

Who is threatened? Journalists who work in Persian, Iranian dissidents and activists, and Jews living far outside Iranian borders or current or former public officials.

What is occurring? The Iranian intelligence services increasingly resort to plots of assassination, kidnapping, surveillance, cyber operations doxxing and criminal intermediaries abroad to silence perceived domestic enemies featuring Canada and its allies in their target list. A statement of over forty countries issued in June 2026 condemning lethal plotting purportedly by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Intelligence Organization, Quds Force and Ministry of Intelligence and Security by Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia or a large number of European governments.

Where is the battlefield? Canadian houses, newsrooms, telephones and social media accounts not only Tehran’s prisons.

The threat of this was laid bare in its alleged Iranian assassination plot against former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler. In 2024, Canadian police informed Cotler that a threat against him had been “imminent,” he said. Although this is still a supposed conspiracy rather than evidence of the court’s ruling, that’s already been successful at inflicting grave injury on sovereignty when someone like a former justice minister now needs round-the-clock security from foreign-state violence.

How does transnational repression work? The state can directly threaten targets, hire organized criminals, hack devices, publish private information or intimidate relatives left behind in Iran. The prize is a psychological occupation physically safe in Canada but mentally held hostage by Tehran.

Why now? The more domestic legitimacy for an authoritarian regime is fractured, the greater the need to ramp up external repression. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement showed how it is possible to beat censorship through the transmission of evidence and organizing solidarity, thereby denying authoritarian regimes a monopoly over the authourized version of truth. So, for Tehran independent reporting is not speech: it is enemy combat.

Canada has not remained passive. In 2024 Parliament passed the Countering Foreign Interference Act, updating national security law; creating new offences; expanding CSIS sharing and disruption powers. Canada designated the IRGC as a terrorist entity, imposed sanctions against Iranian officials and expanded immigration inadmissibility provisions of senior regime figures.

But legislation is not protection. A registry documents netpositive agreements but it does not stop a shooter. Sanctions freeze assets; they do not automatically destroy deniable networks. Such warnings a day early, free of any prosecutions become not the work arks of statecraft but some morbidly clever proclamations of state impotence.

Ottawa therefore needs to create an RCMP-CSIS-cybersecurity-FINTRAC-federal prosecutor transnational-repression prosecution unit. All reasonable threats should result in immediate physical protection, cybersecurity support and family-threat assessments. Canada should publish annual anonymized data on threats, disrupted operations, prosecutions and victim outcomes.

Second, Canada and its G7 partners should synchronize indictments, sanctions, travel bans, asset freezes and legal cyber disruption against Iranian intelligence officers and criminal proxies. The G7 framework, which has recorded the assassination, kidnap and harassment of Iranian dissidents as well as doxxing journalists’ details and menacing Jewish communities, needs to go from condemnation into a crystallized operational alliance.

Third, Ottawa should protect civil liberties. Secret intelligence, vague foreign-association standards and politicized registries may stigmatize Iranian Canadians, the community Tehran wants to intimidate. Any such measures need to be based on the evidence, judicially supervised and targeted at coercive behaviour, not ethnicity or legitimate dissent.

When a journalist branded as a military target for her reporting experiences threats, it is not only personal. You are also being marked for execution, by journalism itself.

The answer on Canada must be as follows: a foreign-directed attack but attempted in Canada is an assault on Canadian sovereignty, democratic freedom and the rule of law.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing Partner Law Firm Victorious Indonesia