Not a single Iranian torturer or kleptocrat has been named under Canada’s Magnitsky law, and the regime’s elites come and go as they please
It’s this. If you participate in civic life as a Canadian citizen, and if you articulate a standpoint on foreign policy favourable to what too many of us boastfully pretend are “Canadian values,” you will pay a price for it. You will be punished. You will be made to feel fear and isolation.The NP Comment newsletter from columnist Colby Cosh and NP Comment editors tackles the important topics with boldness, verve and wit. Get NP Platformed delivered to your inbox weekdays by 4 p.m. ET.
So you will be afraid. You will keep your head down. You will be reluctant to say things when you’re talking to a journalist. It’s why foreign policy in Canada is left almost exclusively to the “experts.”Article content Even so, there was enough about her story that Maryam Shafipour felt sufficiently confident to divulge on the record when we spoke this week that it will give you an idea what it’s like to live in fear like this. It should also give you some idea why so many Iranian-Canadians cannot understand how it was only on Monday of this week, after all these years, that the Trudeau government was hinting that maybe, just maybe, Ottawa will provide something approaching an answer to their pleas for help.
Like Mahsa Amini, Maryam Shafipour was 22 years old when she was arrested. Her crime was her outspoken activism in the cause of reforms championed by presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi during the sham 2009 elections. The subversion of Iran’s officially-rigged election system was especially brazen that year. There were waves of mass protest.
After an intense international campaign by human rights organizations and interventions at the United Nations, Shafipour was released in 2015 and made her way to Canada. In 2018, she was working with Shirin Ebadi, the exiled former Iranian judge and founder of the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran. They were pleading for Canada to adopt a “Magnitsky law,” named after the assassinated Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky.
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