Leave it to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to casually drop a policy bombshell in a press conference. Two weeks ago, he pointed out that Canada’s lack of diplomatic ties with Venezuela had hampered its ability to respond to the horrific earthquake there, and so he proposed reopening the Canadian embassy in not only Caracas but also Tehran.The suggestion has enraged many of the victims and fierce opponents of the Islamic Republic who have found refuge in Canada. But Iranian Canadians could stand to rethink this opposition to diplomatic ties with Iran. In fact, as one of them, I think we must.I left Iran for Canada in 2008 because I was a vocal critic of the regime and had come to fear for my safety. As a journalist in Toronto, I helped expose some of the Islamic Republic’s covert activities on Canadian soil. In 2015, when Canada last sought to reestablish ties with Iran, one major obstacle was the fact that Iran was holding two permanent residents of Canada as political prisoners. One of them was my father, the filmmaker Mostafa Azizi (he was released a year later and has since returned to Canada). But unlike many of my fellow anti-regime Iranian Canadians, I never thought cutting diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic was a good idea.Canada first shut down its Iranian embassy, in Ottawa, in 2012. Among other legitimate grievances, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper cited the gruesome 2003 death in custody of the Iranian Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi, as well as Tehran’s support for terrorist groups whose victims have included Canadians. The list of wrongs has continued to grow in the years since: In January 2020, Iranian security forces shot down a Ukrainian civilian airliner, killing all 176 people on board, including 55 Canadians and 30 permanent residents of Canada (Iran claims that this was an accident).[Tom Nichols: The whiplash of Trump’s Iran capitulation]“Not only has the regime not cooperated with respect to truth and accountability in those cases, it has stonewalled Canada at every turn,” Kaveh Shahrooz, an Iranian Canadian lawyer in Toronto and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, told me. Shahrooz favored the severing of diplomatic relations with Iran on both “justice and national-security grounds.”I am as appalled as anyone by the Islamic Republic’s crimes, but I am not convinced that nonengagement has served to counter them, or yielded any other tangible benefit. Canada now spearheads an annual resolution at the United Nations General Assembly condemning Iran’s dismal human-rights record. This is useful, but most of the resolution’s European co-signers have embassies in Tehran. Sustaining diplomatic ties not only does not stop the Europeans from criticizing the Islamic Republic by means of the UN resolution; it also gives them additional leverage and more direct avenues by which to apply pressure.Sustaining diplomatic relations can allow for people-to-people ties in fields such as trade, sports, and culture. Over time, these kinds of relations can have an effect on a closed society like Iran’s. They threaten the regime’s monopoly on information, for example. That’s why Iran’s Islamist hard-liners attack Western embassies and cultural institutes as dens of corrupting influence—and why freedom-minded Iranians flock to international cultural spaces, such as the German Language Institute (the successor to Tehran’s Goethe-Institut), which the Iranian authorities shut down in 2024.Diplomatic engagement can also influence the complex factional politics inside the Iranian regime. For decades, the Islamic Republic has been internally divided over foreign policy. Some insiders have pushed for toning down anti-Western extremism and for cultivating relations with Western countries. These insiders are critical of the extraterritorial adventures of Iran’s security forces precisely because they see them as harmful to Iran’s global diplomatic stature. By engaging diplomatically, Canada could help boost these critics to win the internal argument.The past 14 years have included some flurries of diplomatic contact between Iran and the West. One of the most significant came in 2015, when the United States and five other powerful countries signed a nuclear deal with Iran. Canada—a middle power with a significant Iranian-diaspora population—played no role in this venture because it had no diplomatic ties.[Read: The betrayal of the Iranian people]I am not naive about the possibilities of diplomacy. Iranian embassies in the West, including the one in Ottawa, have been known to engage in malign behavior. Under the guise of diplomats, members of Iran’s security forces could come to Canada to keep an eye on their Iranian critics abroad, or even to plot terror attacks. Iran is known to monitor Jewish institutions and Israel-linked organizations in many countries, and has targeted them for violent attacks. Its role in attacks in Australia led Canberra to cut ties last year. In 2020, a diplomat operating out of Iran’s embassy in Vienna was convicted by a Belgian court of “attempted terrorist murder.” Sentenced to 20 years in jail, he was later released to Tehran in a prisoner exchange. (Iran often holds Western citizens hostage to enable such exchanges.)The regime could also use diplomatic ties to pressure Canada to drop its support for Iranian civil-society actors, perhaps by offering trade or energy concessions in return. Or it could simply prove impervious to the counterpressure Canada might bring to bear. “Many of the heinous crimes committed by the Iranian regime against Iranians and Canadians occurred while Canada had diplomatic relations with Iran,” Shahrooz pointed out. “Our presence there and our ‘push’ had no effect. I fail to see why it would be different now.”Still, the opposite tack—sanctions and isolation—has neither made the Iranian regime weaker nor made its behavior better. Canada could try another way. If it restored diplomatic relations, it could keep a close eye on Iran’s activities on Canadian soil, push hard on its human-rights violations and other crimes, and do more to build a Western alliance of support for Iran’s civil-society and pro-democracy forces—all while also diplomatically engaging the dictators in Tehran. Canada could use that engagement to undermine the Iranian regime’s boogeyman image of the West, while finding areas of collaboration that could benefit the people of both countries.“Engagement is not endorsement,” Carney said, in defense of his proposed policy.He’s right. Even as it seeks to stand up to Iran, Canada could do so from a new address in Tehran.