Rats Are Jumping Ship: Is the Iranian Regime Relocating to Canada?

This is not an overnight development that just happened in the past two weeks, after the Trump administration and Israel launched attacks on Iran. 

Reports were emerging in January that even while Iranian citizens fed an uprising that led to the murder of roughly 40,000 of them at the hands of the Iranian regime, members of the regime have been quietly relocating to Canada. 

A news site called Justice In Conflict reported in January that “in 2021, a Tehran police chief was spotted at a Toronto-area gym. In 2024, it was reported that 700 Iranian nationals linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) resided in Canada – the same group that has been designated as a terrorist entity by the Canadian government. That same year, five Iranian regime figures faced deportation back to Iran.” 

Now, thanks to the X platform, we have almost real-time proof that the IRGC rats are fleeing the ship. 

Of course, it would be easy to make a lot of assumptions based on a video that can very well be taken out of context. But then there’s this post from X that corroborates the initial X post that went viral. 

We have a name of this Iranian official. It’s Hojjatoleslam Morteza Tayyebi. So is this a one-off? Not according to Canada’s Melissa Lantsman, a member of the Canadian Parliament. 

Lantsman got into greater detail in an op-ed she penned for a Canadian news site called Todayville, where she said that hundreds of IRGC agents may be in Canada. 

While she acknowledged that Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, called that number inaccurate, he won’t confirm any number. 

“This week we learned from the Minister’s own agency that at least 239 people linked to the Iranian regime are living here in Canada and have had their visas revoked,” Lantsman wrote. “Yet of the 239 whose visas have been revoked, only one single person has actually been deported.” 

Lantsman’s numbers are based on news media reports, which she says suggests that 700 IRGC agents may be in Canada. 

When discussing the Canadian government’s seeming paralysis on the issue and the notion of deporting potential hostile residents from Iran, Lantsman said “senior bureaucrats blamed a lack of flights to Iran for the government’s inaction, as if the regime was not already a listed sponsor of terrorism long before the current hostilities.” 

She added that the government “went on about protecting ‘privacy,’ and suggested that some of these individuals might even be able to claim asylum. This is very much another self-own from Canada’s broken and abused refugee system, which is supposed to protect those fleeing violence, not protect those importing it.” 

Carney has gone on record as saying he won’t support the U.S. and Israel in their attacks on Iran. In light of these reports of IRGC members setting up shop in Canada, you have to wonder if Carney’s motives were tied to his desire for peace in the form of the status quo, or has he taken a side in this conflict? 

The last thing the U.S. needs is a shift in the Iranian center of global power and influence from Tehran to the country just north of us. If Canada thinks Trump was tough on them before all of this, Carney & Co. could find out just how resolved the Trump administration is to protect the U.S. from the Iranian threat. 

https://pjmedia.com/tim-o-brien/2026/03/14/is-the-iranian-regime-relocating-to-canada-n4950644