For the second time this week, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre took a more hawkish stance on Iran and its regional allies than Canada or the United States, pressing the Trudeau government Thursday to add the Houthis, the Iran-allied group in Yemen, to Ottawa’s list of terrorist entities.
Poilievre’s remarks came days after he said he backed Israel’s right to hit nuclear facilities in Iran.
He accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — like he did on the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel — of being directly responsible for the rise of antisemitism and the admission of terrorist sympathizers and actors who he said are operating in Canada with impunity. Poilievre also claimed Canada is lagging behind the U.S. on listing the Houthis, known as Ansarallah, as a terrorist organization.
“The Americans banned the Houthis back in January. The Liberals at the time said they were thinking about it. What is there to think about?” asked Poilievre. “The murderous Iranian regime uses groups like Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas to spread violence and terror throughout the world. That’s why the Americans have designated them as a terrorist group, and they have called on others to do the same.”
Speaking at the Pride of Israel synagogue in North York, Poilievre asserted, before dialing back the assertion, that “the Houthis have been operating in our country. Even though they can operate in our country, we don’t know for sure if they have because we don’t have laws to stop or even surveil it.”
Although the U.S. government did announce in January it would blacklist the group that has fired rockets against Israel and attacked commercial shipping in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, less than a month later Washington revoked that group designation “in recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen.”
U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken’s statement at the time said, “We have listened to warnings from the United Nations, humanitarian groups, and bipartisan members of Congress, among others, that the designations could have a devastating impact on Yemenis’ access to basic commodities like food and fuel.” But the U.S. continued to levy sanctions on individual key officials and companies associated with the group for their support in “acts of terrorism targeting commercial shipping,” and enabling the procurement of weapons and military grade and dual-use equipment to the Houthis.
Poilievre reiterated his call earlier this week that Ottawa should blacklist a group known as Samidoun which organized a pro-Palestinian rally in Vancouver Monday night. Parliamentarians denounced rallygoers for chanting “death to Canada, death to the United States and death to Israel” while others burned Canadian flags.
However, Poilievre left it up to his MPs at an Ottawa committee to clarify his position on another contentious point — one that has also challenged the Liberals to clearly explain the government’s position: the question of whether Israel should strike Iran’s nuclear power, research, or weapons development facilities in retaliation for Iran’s missile attack on Israel last week.
Conservative MPs said (as Poilievre’s office did late Wednesday) that Poilievre never supported retaliatory strikes against Iran’s nuclear power generation facilities, which Defence Minister Bill Blair said is against international law on armed conflict.
They said Poilievre backed Israel’s right to hit nuclear weapons development facilities — a move U.S. President Joe Biden has said he opposes.
Israel is dependent on American military assets, including the mountain-busting munitions needed to deliver any fatal blow to some of those facilities buried deep underground.
Little is publicly known about a conversation Wednesday that Biden had with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about what Israel intends to target next. Aides described their call only as direct, frank and productive.
Nevertheless, Poilievre’s statements represent a step further than the U.S. has indicated it would support as Biden stresses the need to stop a wider war.
On Monday, Poilievre said “Israel must be able to prevent Iran from using nuclear weapons, if necessary, that means proactively striking Iranian nuclear sites and oil installations to defund the terrorist regime.” On Tuesday, Poilievre said, “If Israel were to stop that genocidal, theocratic, unstable government from acquiring nuclear weapons, it would be a gift by the Jewish state to humanity.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly said Poilievre’s position would jeopardize peace in the Middle East.
On Thursday, Poilievre continued to call on Ottawa to adopt a more aggressive posture in defence of Israel’s right to strike back for last week’s missile attacks by Tehran, and claimed Blair now also backed that stand.
Appearing at a Commons standing committee on national defence on Thursday morning, Blair said the Geneva Conventions on the rules of war prohibit targeting nuclear power facilities, because of the impact on civilians and the environment. When pressed by Conservatives about whether nuclear weapons research facilities are legitimate targets, Blair conceded “there are very limited circumstances where those could be legitimate targets, but the international conventions on the law of armed conflict very specifically prohibits the targeting of nuclear facilities.”
He went on to say there is “very serious concern that … if anyone was to target a nuclear facility anywhere in the world, whether in Ukraine and Zaporizhzhia or any place in the world, that that represents an unacceptable risk to innocent civilians and to the environment.”
According to Reuters, Iran has one operating nuclear power plant, and a handful of other nuclear research facilities, including sites where Iran conducts uranium enrichment efforts.
Iran pulled out of an international non-proliferation deal, and the International Atomic Energy Agency says its inspectors have been hampered when trying to monitor and verify Iran’s nuclear resources.
