LaurenzArt, Saskatoon, SK (2026)

04/09/2026

A very important reminder. PLEASE READ.

Tonight, at 5 o'clock Pacific, Donald Trump says he'll commit war crimes against the nation of Iran.
This isn't a political channel, but I want to talk about the connection Canada has with Iranians, because tonight it matters.

There are around a quarter-million Canadians of Iranian origin living here. They came mostly after 1979, when the Islamic Revolution made Iran unlivable for secular professionals, religious minorities, academics, and anyone who believed that women deserved to exist in public without a dress code enforced by police.
They came with their families and their grief, and Canada said: "Come in, make this your home."
The earliest arrivals slotted quickly into professional life as engineers, doctors, lawyers, and dentists. One Iranian family built the West Edmonton Mall. Another founded Future Shop. Iranian-Canadians now hold chairs at McGill, lead cybersecurity labs, and serve in Parliament.
These are people who, when given the chance to breathe, build things and employ people.

Here is something worth reminding the U.S. administration: In 1979, when the revolution happened and the American embassy in Tehran was overrun, six American diplomats escaped into the streets.
We took them in. Canadians. We hid them for 79 days in our own homes. Spirited them out under cover at great risk — not diplomatic risk, but risk to the lives of our people.
The Americans made a movie out of it, and rewrote the story to make the CIA the big heroes because of course they did.

Since 2020 alone, more than 55,000 Iranian citizens have become permanent residents of Canada.
Most of them oppose the Islamic Republic with a depth of feeling that most Canadians can barely imagine.
They've watched from here as their cousins and aunts and old professors got arrested for protesting. As young women were beaten in the street for showing their hair.
They are Canadians now, fully, and they are watching what is happening to their people with a kind of sorrow that has no name in English, though Persian probably has seventeen words for it.
Tonight they are sitting in their homes in Toronto and Vancouver and Montreal, watching a clock tick toward 5 p.m. Pacific, knowing that the bombs, if they fall, will fall on someone they love.

What Trump is threatening to do to Iran will kill civilians. It will knock out power to hospitals and water treatment plants. It will fall on the uncles and grandmothers of kids who go to school in Burnaby and Mississauga and North York.
It is by every definition a war crime.
But at least when it’s all over, Canada won't have to remember this moment for what we bombed. And who we killed.
We'll remember it for who we hold.

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