Iranian-Canadian communities are greeting news of the death of Iran’s supreme leader with jubilation, according to Liberal MP Ali Ehsassi.
Ehsassi, whose Willowdale riding in Toronto has a significant Iranian-Canadian population, was in the crowd at a large protest against the Iranian regime in Richmond Hill on Saturday when news of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death was made public.
“The crowd was absolutely jubilant, so incredibly happy,” Ehsassi, whose family emigrated from Iran after the 1979 revolution, said in an interview with Global News on Sunday.
“The supreme leader was the architect of the apparatus of fear within Iran, and also obviously the individual responsible for making sure that his regime became the chief sponsor of international terrorism. So all of the bloodshed that this regime committed (against protesters) a month ago has really, really hardened attitudes and people are just desperately looking for a new chapter in Iran.”
The U.S. and Israel launched a surprise bombing campaign against Iran on Saturday, which Iranian authorities say killed more than 200 people in Tehran, including Khamenei and several high-ranking Iranian officials. The death toll includes at least 115 people who were killed when bombs fell on an girls’ school in southern Iran, according to the local governor who spoke to state television.
Iran vowed revenge Sunday and launched strikes at Israel and Gulf States, heightening concerns of a prolonged war that could consume the region. Three U.S. military members have died, 11 people were killed in Israel and scores more injured across the region.
But Ehsassi said that the Iranian-Canadian diaspora are not “too concerned” about the situation devolving into a regional war.
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“I think members of the diaspora, generally, look at Iran and they just know that its military is just antiquated. To them, it seems this is all empty threats and the regime has very few tools at its disposal,” Ehsassi said.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who told American voters he would end U.S. involvement in “forever wars,” warned Iran that responding to the U.S. bombing campaign will result in more U.S. bombing campaigns.
“THEY BETTER NOT DO THAT … BECAUSE IF THEY DO, WE WILL HIT THEM WITH A FORCE THAT HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE,” Trump, who has styled himself the “president of peace,” posted on social media at 1 a.m. on Sunday.
Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is currently in India on a trade mission, told reporters traveling with him that Canada will not participate in the U.S.-led military campaign against Iran.
But Carney raised some eyebrows with his official statement in the wake of the attacks, which vocally supported the U.S. bombing campaign.
“Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security,” the statement, sent Saturday, read.
But the White House said just last week that the U.S. had already “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program in its previous bombing campaign, launched in June 2025. In a video posted online in the middle of the night Saturday, Trump said this bombing campaign — dubbed “Epic Fury” by the Americans — was about eliminating “imminent threats” from the Iranian regime.
Writing in the Toronto Star, former Liberal foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy said Carney’s support for the U.S. actions exposed a “fault line at the heart” of Canadian foreign policy.
“(Canada invokes) international law and the ‘rules based international order’ when adversaries engage in unlawful actions, but abandon those same rules entirely when it’s the Americans — whose current government 60 per cent of Canadians now see as a threat — doing the bombing,” Axworthy wrote.
“For a country that depends on law more than force for its own security, that is not realism; it is recklessness.”
Canadian national security scholar Wesley Wark noted Canada’s statement says that what it supports — preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons — is not what Trump has said the U.S. is aiming to do with this war, which includes regime change in Iran.
“The stated purposes of (Canada’s) support, at their high level of generality, do not encompass the totality of U.S. war aims as Trump has outlined them. But now we are stuck with full support,” Wark wrote on Sunday.
“No one would argue with the position, fully established in international law, that Israel has the right to defend itself. Is that what we think Israel is doing in joining this U.S. war against Iran?”
Carney is expected to speak to reporters traveling on his trade mission early Monday morning.
Ehsassi acknowledged that Carney’s statement has raised eyebrows among some, but he said that he has not heard any criticism coming from Iranian-Canadians.
With files from Global’s wire services.
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