For much of its modern history, Canada has enjoyed a strategic privilege that few countries possess. Geography provided distance from the world’s most volatile regions, powerful alliances supplied an additional layer of security, and the stability of North America allowed Ottawa to think about many international crises principally as matters of foreign policy. That distinction is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. The emerging threats to Canada do not necessarily arrive across its borders in recognizable military form. They travel through cyberspace, financial networks, intelligence relationships, criminal intermediaries, political influence and transnational repression. The central national-security question for Canada is therefore changing. It is no longer simply how the country should respond to instability abroad, but how it should defend its sovereignty when authoritarian states project power into Canadian society itself.
The Islamic Republic of Iran provides an unusually revealing case study of this transformation. Tehran has traditionally been viewed in Ottawa through the familiar lenses of nuclear proliferation, terrorism, sanctions, Middle Eastern instability and its confrontation with Israel and the United States. Those concerns remain substantial, but they are no longer sufficient. Canada’s own security establishment increasingly describes an Iranian threat that extends beyond conventional foreign policy. CSIS has identified Iran as a relatively sophisticated actor in foreign interference and has warned that Tehran employs intelligence services, proxies and intermediaries to pursue opponents abroad. Its recent assessments also anticipate that Iranian foreign interference and transnational repression may intensify as the regime perceives greater threats to its survival. The significance of that assessment extends well beyond Iran itself: it illustrates how the boundary separating foreign affairs from domestic security is disappearing.
Transnational repression should consequently be understood not merely as a human-rights problem but as an intrusion upon sovereignty. When an authoritarian government attempts to determine what a dissident may say in Toronto, whom an activist may meet in Vancouver, or what a journalist may publish in Montreal, it is effectively attempting to extend its jurisdiction into Canadian territory. The individual victim may be Iranian, Chinese, Russian or another nationality, but the principle being violated is Canadian. Freedom of expression ceases to be fully Canadian if a foreign intelligence service can impose consequences upon its exercise. A state that tolerates such coercion does not merely fail to protect an individual; it permits another government to establish an invisible sphere of authority inside its borders.
Iran is particularly important because asymmetric power has been embedded in the strategic culture of the Islamic Republic for decades. Tehran understands the enormous conventional imbalance between itself and the Western alliance. It has therefore developed methods through which weakness can be transformed into leverage: proxies, covert operations, cyber capabilities, intelligence networks, financial channels and relationships with non-state actors. The sophistication lies less in any single instrument than in the ability to combine them while maintaining layers of deniability. Western governments, by contrast, often divide these manifestations among bureaucratic categories. A cyberattack becomes a cybersecurity matter, an assassination plot becomes a criminal investigation, suspicious financial activity becomes a sanctions issue, intimidation of dissidents becomes community protection, and political manipulation becomes foreign interference. Yet what appears institutionally fragmented in Ottawa may be strategically integrated in Tehran.
Canada therefore needs to develop what might be called network-based national security. The purpose is not to enlarge government power indiscriminately, but to improve the state’s ability to recognize relationships among apparently separate events. When credible foreign interference is detected, the investigation should extend beyond the immediate actor to the architecture surrounding the activity: financing, facilitators, digital infrastructure, intelligence contacts, commercial relationships, criminal intermediaries and organizations capable of providing legitimate cover. Modern counterintelligence succeeds not simply by identifying the person who performs an operation, but by illuminating the network that made the operation possible. The objective should be to make Canada an increasingly difficult environment in which hostile states can construct such networks without detection.
Ottawa has already taken important steps. Canada designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity under the Criminal Code in 2024, while CSIS has publicly described credible threats associated with Iranian activities and the regime’s willingness to use proxies and individuals connected with transnational organized crime against perceived enemies abroad. More recently, the creation of Canada’s Foreign Influence Transparency Registry has provided another instrument for exposing arrangements through which foreign principals seek to influence Canadian political and governmental processes. These measures represent an important evolution in Canadian security thinking because they recognize that foreign power can operate through structures far removed from traditional espionage.
Yet effective counterintelligence requires precision as much as vigilance. Canada must never confuse Iranian identity with allegiance to the Islamic Republic. Indeed, Iranian Canadians are often among the regime’s most determined opponents, and many left Iran precisely because they rejected its political and ideological system. An indiscriminate approach toward diaspora communities would therefore be both unjust and strategically counterproductive. It would alienate precisely those communities that authoritarian governments seek to intimidate and would replace intelligence with suspicion. The appropriate distinction is not between Canadians and foreigners, or between one ethnic community and another, but between legitimate civic activity and covert activity conducted at the direction or for the benefit of a hostile state.
This distinction points toward a broader principle of democratic security. An authoritarian state can protect itself by closing society; a democracy must protect itself while remaining open. That makes counterintelligence more difficult, but also more important. Universities must remain places of intellectual exchange, political organizations must remain accessible to citizens, diaspora communities must remain free to participate in public life, and legitimate international relationships must continue. The task of security institutions is therefore not to construct walls around Canadian society, but to identify with greater accuracy the points at which openness is being deliberately exploited. A sophisticated democracy does not necessarily cast a wider security net; it develops a more discriminating one.
Cyber operations make this transformation particularly urgent. Physical distance once provided Canada with a degree of insulation from conflicts occurring thousands of kilometres away. Digital infrastructure has radically reduced that advantage. Iranian-linked cyber actors have demonstrated interest in Western governmental, technological and critical-infrastructure targets, while Canadian security reporting has also addressed cyber-enabled activity directed toward dissidents. The strategic implication is profound: geography remains important to defence, but it can no longer define the boundaries of national security. A hostile actor may be geographically distant while being operationally present inside the networks upon which Canadian government, commerce and society depend.
Nor should Canada understand Iran in isolation. CSIS has identified several states—including China, Russia, India, Iran and Pakistan—in connection with significant foreign-interference or espionage concerns. The Iranian case is therefore part of a larger transformation in the international system. Authoritarian and revisionist states increasingly recognize that open democracies possess vulnerabilities precisely because they are open: information circulates freely, institutions are accessible, political participation is decentralized and economic relationships cross borders. Canada’s response to Iran should consequently contribute to a broader doctrine of democratic resilience capable of addressing different adversaries without sacrificing the constitutional freedoms that distinguish Canada from them.
Such a doctrine requires a deeper integration of intelligence, law enforcement, financial intelligence, border security and cyber defence. It also requires political leaders to understand that prevention is not synonymous with overreaction. Democracies naturally prefer to respond after wrongdoing becomes visible and evidence satisfies the standards of criminal prosecution. Intelligence works earlier in the sequence. Its purpose is often to recognize patterns before they mature into operations. The challenge is to build institutions capable of acting upon sophisticated warning while maintaining rigorous legal oversight. Security and liberty are not opposing objectives when the threat itself is designed to undermine the conditions under which liberty can safely exist.
Iran also offers Canada one final strategic lesson. Regimes under pressure do not invariably become less dangerous abroad. Sometimes the opposite occurs. As conventional options narrow and domestic insecurity increases, asymmetric instruments become more attractive because they are comparatively inexpensive, deniable and capable of producing effects disproportionate to the resources invested. A weakened authoritarian state may therefore become more dependent on intelligence operations, cyber activity, proxies and coercion beyond its borders. CSIS's warning that Iranian foreign-interference and transnational-repression activities could increase as threats to the regime intensify should be read within precisely this strategic context.
Canada is thus confronting a question much larger than its policy toward Tehran. The traditional conception of sovereignty was primarily territorial: a government defended its borders, airspace, institutions and population from external attack. Twenty-first-century sovereignty must include something more. It must protect the independence of political decision-making, the integrity of digital infrastructure, the freedom of diaspora communities, the autonomy of public institutions and the right of every person on Canadian soil to speak without being subjected to the coercive authority of a foreign state.
The great challenge for Canada is not to choose between openness and security. It is to understand that a democratic society can preserve openness only if it develops the intelligence, institutional confidence and strategic imagination necessary to defend it. The threats of the coming decade may rarely resemble invasion in the traditional sense. They may instead appear as networks, influence, intimidation, cyber penetration and deniable coercion. Recognizing that transformation is the beginning of an effective national-security doctrine. Canada does not need to become a fortress. It needs to ensure that its openness remains a democratic strength rather than an authoritarian opportunity.
Canada must not become for the remnants of the Islamic Republic what Latin America once became for fleeing Nazis—a sanctuary where, after the regime’s collapse, Islamist terrorists and surviving elements of its apparatus can find refuge and rebuild their networks. Preventing such an outcome should be a matter of particular national-security importance to both Liberals and Conservatives alike.
