Canadian journalist Aidan Jonah. Photo: Tehran Times.
In an exclusive interview with the Tehran Times, Aidan Jonah, editor-in-chief of The Canada Files, delivers an incisive critique of Canada’s role in perpetuating Western imperialist agendas, particularly against Iran.
Renowned for his investigative work and a report submitted to the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council in September 2021, Jonah offers a compelling analysis of modern imperialism, which he defines as neocolonialism driven by proxy governance, financial warfare, and the manipulation of diaspora communities.
Jonah, whose leading independent news outlet focuses on Canadian foreign policy, examines Canada’s position as a subordinate ally to U.S. foreign policy, arguing that its alignment with American objectives shapes its hostile posture toward Iran.
He exposes the contradictions of liberal democratic states like Canada, which project an image of human rights advocacy while endorsing policies that undermine Iranian sovereignty. Highlighting the role of Canada’s intelligence community and mainstream media, Jonah critiques their complicity in amplifying anti-Iranian sentiments and marginalizing pro-sovereignty voices within the Iranian diaspora.
The interview also explores strategies Iran could employ—through media, diplomacy, and hard power—to counter Western narratives and strengthen its regional influence. Jonah emphasizes the importance of Iran’s unity and strategic alliances, particularly with rising powers like China and BRICS, to bolster its resilience against external aggression. His insights serve as both a critical examination of global power dynamics and a call for greater awareness of the mechanisms sustaining Western imperialism.
The following is the text of the interview:
You frame Canada’s Iran posture as part of a broader imperialist project. How do you define modern imperialism, and where does Canada fit into this structure?
To me, modern imperialism can be broken down into a few sections, but in short, neocolonialism is the best way to put it.
Because no longer do we see the old style, say for example, the French breaking of Vietnam up into three parts in the past, and so forth. Nowadays, what we see, for example, like the situation in Ukraine after the 2014 Maidan coup that the U.S. instigated and led, you have had technically Ukrainian governments, quote-unquote, but really they were proxies for Washington. And so that, over the many years, has been the main way that once a nation is conquered, that’s how they’re controlled, rather than, say, the old-style British governors in India, for example.
But in terms of how they get to that, that usually comes from a combination of mercenaries. The West doesn’t really like drafts anymore after the Vietnam War. Fiasco for them.
They also use the comprador elites. They try to build up these elites that will benefit despite their nation’s impoverishment and suffering under Western control, or build them up to be people who can govern. And then you have the collaborators, usually in the diaspora, and then you also have some of the lower-level collaborators who will develop in a country.
And in that way, you end up having, really, an all-of-society attack on these countries. And, of course, I just mentioned the final step. That’s the second step.
And then, obviously, the big thing overall is to maintain control via financial means. If they can’t outright invade a country, or if they can’t establish their proxies, they can use financial leverage, say, for example, SWIFT. They can use the U.S. currency, as we’ve seen it, using it as a weapon, using sanctions.
Financial warfare has been rampant. But it really has sparked up since Russia’s special military operation began in 2022. But we’re seeing it escalating now with this potential for secondary sanctions that are being put on anybody that buys from Russia in 50 days [September 3, 2025].
Trump says he wants a deal. I don’t believe that at all. I don’t think the U.S. wants a deal.
I don’t think they ever have. So, we’re going to see secondary sanctions come on as well. Venezuela has been hit with them before, too.
And, I mean, Iran has dealt with brutal, brutal sanctions. Iran knows sanctions very, very well, especially after 2012, after the coordinated push to punish Iran for this idea of a plan for nuclear weapons, even though Ayatollah Khomeini has repeatedly talked about, you know, not wanting those for Iran. And we’ll have to see if that remains in the future.
But that’s most certainly been a quite consistent state position. It’s been ignored. And that’s because you need a narrative.
You [the Western governments] need a justification to pursue imperialism against countries such as Iran.
To what extent do you think Canada’s approach to Iran is influenced by its alignment with the US and Israeli foreign policy objectives?
I most certainly think it’s extremely influenced by its alignment with the US. Because I think Canada is very much a junior partner within the broader sphere of Western imperialism.
Canada most certainly would aggressively target countries on its own, even if the US did not exist. But most certainly, it is servile to the Americans and has been for a long, long time. Now in terms of Israel, to me, Israel has always been a proxy of the United States.
I mean, I think about the murder of Sayyed Nasrallah, who has very clearly stated such a thing in the past. And it’s quite obvious that Israel is nothing but a proxy for the Americans. And so, I would say Canada doesn’t go to the beat of Israel’s policy.
It goes to the beat of American policy, which is everything that Israel would need to try to control the region for America’s benefit.
How do liberal democratic states like Canada maintain the image of human rights advocacy while at the same time supporting regimes and policies hostile to Iranian sovereignty?
So it’s a campaign of blatant lies.
That’s what it’s always been. It’s been a campaign of blatant lies, because colonialism and imperialism, whether it’s been in the classical form or whether we see now more modern, more neocolonialism, you need a justification for the imperial core population to support the butchering of nations, the butchering of people, the destruction and subversion of cultures. I mean, the religious sectarianism that the West has fostered for so many decades, you need the Westerners to support that.
So, they blatantly lie. They fund organizations, Canadian military. There’s an author, Yves Engler, he’s written about how the Canadian military funds organizations in Canada.
And the Canadian government has put in hundreds of millions, in almost the last decade, into media organizations in the country. So, the media atmosphere, well, in Canada, it’s purportedly free.
And once you look at the overall structures and you look at where the money goes and you look at what Canada does, you realize, oh, they just brazenly lied to me. They just brazenly lied.
And that’s what they do. And because Canada, the US, and the Western powers, came into more wealth in the past because they stole from people and nations around the world. That’s how they got their own extreme wealth.
And then they used some of that to build up, build industry, and get advantages. That’s why they could then claim that they were beacons of human rights, beacons of this and that, because they stole their way to the top. And they just lied to the population.
They lied to the world. And regretfully, you see a lot of people in the global South who are still struggling to fight these attempts to colonize their minds. They’re struggling with it.
And the Global South is fighting a very hard battle. And I think it’s working. But certainly in the West, in Canada, from my experience, it’s still a long, long battle to go.
But it’ll work for a while.
What role does Canada’s military-industrial complex and intelligence community play in sustaining anti-Iran sentiment domestically and internationally?
So, I think in terms of the demonization of Iran from these two factors you mentioned, I think the intelligence community would play the biggest role here, because through the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the main intelligence service in Canada, they are the ones who will spread fear about supposed Iranian plots in Canada. I mean, a far bigger threat right now, the military is more so for assisting Israel, Canada’s presence in the Middle East.
I think that has been explored by many other authors. But the target is more so people in the political class. I think of someone like Irwin Cotler, for example.
An Irwin Cotler alone, in terms of rhetoric, is far more dangerous to the Iranian community in Canada than the entire Canadian defense ministry combined. Because the intelligence mostly takes that role on. Cotler, of course, you know from the article, that’s why you reached out to me.
He’s the one who claimed that there are sleeper cells, Iranian sleeper cells in Canada. So, as much as I have my complaints with the Canadian military, I also don’t think they are precisely involved with this part. That’s more of the intelligence services.
You criticize mainstream Canadian media for uncritically amplifying state narratives. How would you characterize the media’s role in perpetuating anti-Iran sentiments?
I think the media is very central to maintaining a [negative] sentiment against Iran. And I think we can look back to 2012, when you had the unilateral move by the then-Stephen Harper government in Canada to cancel the Iranian embassy and eventually shut down the Canadian embassy in Iran as well. There was really a lack of proper scrutiny around that.
Generally, that’s the deal with the Canadian mainstream media: they are part of selling the foreign policy, right? They are the stenographers in general. That is their role, fundamentally, right? They’re not the journalists in Gaza, not those who put their lives at risk in Lebanon, and so forth. They [most Western journalists] are the stenographers.
They are the ones who say what they are told. Or the few that don’t, they build their own projects to get it started. That’s how the media really works in the West.
And so, fully, as the Iranian King community, I was talking with Reza Namdari, who was formerly involved with the Iranian Canadian Congress, and he talked about that feeling of being a second-class citizen in Canada as an Iranian Canadian. Did the mainstream media care about that? Most certainly not. Irwin Cotler helped get the MEK, which is a reprehensible terrorist organization, off the list in Canada for terrorists.
Again, did Canada’s media wage a big battle here? Not so much, no. I mean, further look at the abuse that Chinese Canadians have faced in the country, and I’ve covered this for years. Again, they are fueling it actively.
They actually not only do they produce malpractice in terms of their coverage and lack of critical faculties, but they also fuel it. And so, they are extremely responsible. They are stenographers of empire, and they get paid to do a certain role, and as much as they might make noise about it and whine occasionally, they know what their role is, and people suffer for that.
How do you interpret the portrayal of Iranian diaspora communities as either tools or threats within Canadian national security discourse?
Oh, well, certainly, that is an absolute reality, and really, it’s an absolute disgrace, and I think the CSIS, the organization that I mentioned, is a really crucial front in terms of this divide. Now, in terms of this divide of the diaspora communities, I actually spoke with an independent senator in Canada recently.
Yuen Pao Woo is his name. Now, he’s actually focused a lot on the situation of Chinese Canadians recently, but he spoke to me about this idea of ‘Modern Exclusion’. Now, I would refer to it personally as McCarthyism, the tactic of anti-communist claims of other people being communist when they weren’t, or they might have been, but it was supposed to be a bad thing in the Americas in the 1950s, beginning there. But now, with the proposal by Senator Woo, he’s talking about the division.
You have two parts, or three sometimes, [even four] of the diaspora community, and right now, in the Iranian community, you have the ones who want neutrality with Iran, just basic diplomatic relations. Then you have the Iranian monarchists who want to put the son of Pahlavi back into power, really against the will of the Iranian people, and then you have the MEK supporters in Canada, so it’s perhaps an extra level in terms of complexity, but what you have is both the MEK and probably more so the monarchists that are being played to in the Canadian sense, Canadian politics, Canadian media, politicians. I mean, in Ontario, for example, we had an MPP.
She’s no longer one. She’s up in the Ottawa area of Canada. That’s the capital, that’s the capital city, and her name’s Goldie Ghamari, and she was a hard supporter of Israel, wants regime change for Iran, and she eventually got kicked out because she met a white nationalist, but her support for regime change in Iran was never a problem, and she got a positive attention, I think, early on.
Again, the MEK speaks for itself. They just don’t get enough scrutiny, and then you have a lot of these sides that they’re monarchists or they’re MEK, or there’s a smaller faction that just doesn’t support either one but wants regime change in Iran, and they, on the large, on large support Israel. You know, I think about an Iranian justice collective.
They have one of these guys is a lawyer, Kaveh Shahrooz, and he is actually a senior fellow at the MacDonald-Laurier Institute. That organization has taken money from the Latvian Defense Ministry before, and many others, but he and ‘Iranian Justice Collective’, this collective, they support this supposed Israeli narrative about an Iranian nuclear weapon program. First of all, the idea that Iran doesn’t have the right to have them [is ridiculous], which Iran, very much, if it chose to, definitely has the right to.
Look at what happened to Japan when they didn’t have nuclear weapons, when the US was alone in half of that, and look at what happened to Japan. Look at how Iraq got invaded when they supposedly had WMDs, but look at how you can call them DPRK [preferable], or you can call them North Korea [more common for Westerners]. They’ve never gotten invaded.
Why? Because they have nukes. So, you have this part of the, a very mixed part of the Iranian community, just to keep things on focus. And, of course, the key media and politicians very much take the side of the monarchists, MEK, and then this other grouping that just generally supports regime change in Iran.
They take their side very much, and the side that is pro-Islamic Republic is, you know, they’re [supposedly] not loyal. They’re serving the IRGC. They’re serving the Iranian government.
You know, they had the IRGC on the terrorist list, and now it’s causing a lot of problems for some Iranian Canadians. And so, when you see an organization like the Iranian Canadian Congress, for example, again, look, they’re not pro-Islamic Republic, but they are supporters of Iran’s sovereignty. They’ve been viciously attacked for wanting the IRGC off the list because of the impact it’s having on Iranian Canadians, who in no way, shape, or form have anything to do with the Iranian military anymore, or any sort of part of the Iranian government.
And they get attacked by the different wings of the Iranian Canadian diaspora as disloyal or, you know, arms of the Ayatollah, you know, and all that jazz. So, and then again, they [pro-regime change elements] get positions in the think tanks. Some of them become politicians, and the media often takes their side.
Oh, the poor Iranian, poor Iranian Canadian dissidents, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, you know, the Iranians have unlocked their sleeper cells, and they’re going to target Jews, and they’re going to target Iranian dissidents, according to one person who is a former justice minister. You know, that’s how the government and media take the side of one part of the community, and they perform this ‘Modern Exclusion’, as the senator who spoke to me about in the interview earlier this week.
In your view, what steps could Iran take through media, diplomacy, or soft power to counteract the aggressive narrative pushed in the West?
Independent journalist: Canada’s posture on Iran serves US and Israeli interests.
I think Iran has started to have [more people visit from anti-imperialist media]. The Grayzone editor, Max Blumenthal, visited Iran in recent times. I think I’ve seen other social media pro-resistance influencers who have gone to visit Iran in the last few months.
You now have someone like Richard Medhurst, who’s a British journalist, being persecuted for his support for Palestine through his journalism. You have someone like Calla Walsh, who is an activist out in the United States, who’s involved in Palestine action out in the United States, and she ran her way through the legal system in a separate sense from her activism. She’s also going to be coming to Iran, according to posts of hers.
So, most certainly, I’ve seen a stepping-up of efforts by the Iranian government to showcase the domestic situation and the anti-imperial efforts. In terms of diplomacy, I mean, in quite blunt terms, I would say build stronger relations with China and get their high-quality military technology. I think there’s already been a push towards getting the, I think it’s J-10 from the Chinese, more about the merrier, because hard power really is, at the end of the day, the only thing the Western governments truly respect.
So, build the hard power through the military and through the media, and escalate the tours. I think those are important for knowledge. But, other than that, soft power, again, it’s soft power, I mean goodwill in your own region, but there are already efforts, many decades of supporting resistance groupings through the region while respecting those groups’ sovereignty, of course.
So, there isn’t a lot on the soft power front that can be done, especially within the West, given the control over the levers of the media by the financial elite, by the politicians, and the media can preserve them. So, a lot of this future critical part is hard power, the ability to defend, the ability to punish military aggression. I think that’s the most important thing.
Westerners don’t, and I say that as a Westerner, have a good history of truly forcing their governments to take action. The Vietnam War was a rarity, rather than a commonality, in terms of what happened after these protests.
Before we wrap up, is there anything you would like to add?
Well, I’m obviously very grateful for the opportunity to speak, as you can imagine, with the camp, as with our pro-resistance, anti-imperialist politics, we actually don’t get the most chances to speak about our work and our views, so it’s an honor to be here and speak. But, more than anything, I would say that the resistance is fighting a very just fight, and that building strength is more crucial than anything else. I would love to believe that Westerners can really step in well, but most certainly, as a grouping of Westerners, we can’t really [be relied] on to do that.
So, most importantly, build the power, build that domestic capability, keep the country unified. I’ve seen a wave of unity within Iran, and I’ve heard from reports that the younger generation is really seeing themselves in the country, more so, they’re seeing the danger of Israel more properly after the attacks. So, I would say that Iran should build its own power.
That’s the most crucial thing of anything else. And cooperate with the rising BRICS axis in building sovereignty.
(Tehran Times) by Sahar Dadjoo
