Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre had a quiet mission to Iran, and now people have noticed

MONTREAL — Denis Coderre’s city hall website provides regular updates of the jet-setting Montreal mayor’s travels. Currently, he is on a week-long mission to South America. Two weeks ago, he was in Beirut for a three-day conference of francophone mayors.

But one recent visit did not make it onto the website: an early October side trip to Iran to meet the mayor of Tehran, a prominent figure in the country’s repressive theocracy.

Members of Canada’s Iranian community learned of the trip through Iranian news sources. Some are outraged that Coderre would quietly meet in Tehran with a representative of a regime Canada has labelled a state supporter of terrorism.

“The Iranian regime is a terrorist regime,” said Shabnam Assadollahi, an Ottawa writer and human rights activist who was imprisoned in Iran as a teenager. “Why would the mayor of Montreal make quiet deals with a terrorist regime?”

According to an Oct. 2 report by the Tasnim News Agency, which is linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Coderre signed an agreement with Tehran in his role as president of Metropolis, an association of global cities. One photo shows the two smiling mayors sitting under a portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

While the visit passed virtually unnoticed back home, Coderre’s meeting with Tehran Mayor Baqer Qalibaf was big news in Iran.

One photo of Coderre showed a desk-top Canadian flag and other coverage included the city of Montreal’s logo. The Tasnim report said Qalibaf expressed the hope Coderre’s visit would lead to “stronger cooperation” between Tehran and Montreal in “municipal and cultural affairs.”

The meeting came even though Canadian diplomatic ties with Iran continue to be ruptured. Canada closed its embassy in Tehran in 2012 for various reasons, including Iran’s nuclear program.

In June, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion said official talks had begun about a resumption of ties, and last month he met Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at the United Nations in New York.

Payam Akhavan, a law professor at McGill University and founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre, said Coderre’s visit offers propaganda value to a regime trying to overcome its pariah status.

He said Qalibaf, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2013, is seen as a pragmatist rather than a hardliner.

“He is not among the worst, but that’s a relative concept,” Akhavan said.

“The only politicians who survive are ones who are deemed to be ideologically safe, and who have compromised with the right people and the right interests. So having contact with them is nothing to celebrate.”

A former Revolutionary Guard officer, Qalibaf has called Israel “a cancerous tumour in the region” and bragged about his role in crushing student protests in 1999 and 2003.

Coderre’s office said he will not be available to comment on his Iran trip until he returns next week from meetings in Colombia and Ecuador.

Amir Khadir, a Québec Solidaire member of the National Assembly who was born in Iran, said he texted Coderre as soon as he learned the mayor was in Tehran. He asked Coderre to raise the matter of a recently imprisoned human-rights defender, but it was too late because Coderre’s official meetings were finished.

Khadir said he is satisfied Coderre has a strategy for addressing human-rights issues with the Iranians.

“As an opponent of the Iranian theocracy and dictatorship, I understand that some advocacy can be carried out despite the fact that this government in Iran is very deaf to any protests,” he said.

But Iraj Rezaei, president of the Council of Iranian Refugees and Immigrants in Toronto, said Coderre is deluded if he thinks he can prompt change in a regime that executes minors, imprisons critics and bars women from attending soccer matches.

“The Iranian government has been there 33 years, and nothing has changed,” he said.

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