Some Iranian said it will close channels for peace negotiations and human rights advocacy.
For Iranian foreign students, such as Ehsan Mohammadi, president of the Iranian Culture Association of Carleton University, the future is unclear. Mohammadi is the son of an Iranian diplomat.
He doesn’t know if he’ll be removed from the country along with his father, the embassy’s cultural attaché.
“On this, I don’t know anything yet. I just received the news,” said Mohammadi.
Carleton’s Iranian culture association co-sponsored five on-campus events during the past year with the Iranian embassy’s culture centre, including a June conference that celebrated the achievements of Iranian theocrat Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Outside Iran’s Metcalfe Street embassy on Friday, visitors were confronted by a sign posted on the door. Written in Farsi, it was translated as saying: “According to a hostile decision by the government of Canada, we are closed and no longer working.”
Behrooz Tabesh, 27, a foreign student at Concordia University, was angered upon arriving from Montreal.
“I believe it’s a silly move of the Mickey Mouse government of Canada to shut down our embassy,” said Tabesh, who studies computer science. “Their reasons are ridiculous.”
He said it was unfair for Canada to target Iran for its support of Syria when both China and Russia are doing the same. And any response to Iran’s nuclear program, he argued, should come from the United Nations.
Afghan immigrant Ali Said waited outside the embassy for hours, trying to retrieve his passport which he had left in order to obtain a visa. After waiting for more than two hours, he was able to recover his passport, but he won’t be going to Iran.
Iranian diplomats in Ottawa have been given five days to leave Canada.
Ali Tabatabaei, a member of the Iranian Green Movement Ottawa and the opposition party National Front of Iran, said the move makes negotiation impossible and increases the chances of war.
Others worried that the embassy closure will make it difficult for Iranian-Canadians to obtain visas and to register marriages.
Naeim Karimi, an Iranian citizen who recently married a Canadian, said his marriage registration is now stuck at the embassy. He said cutting diplomatic ties is short-sighted.
“I don’t think it was a smart move,” he said. “This path has been tried and tested and it never works, it just puts a lot of trouble in way of Iranians who reside in Canada.”
The end of diplomatic ties also raises more questions about the future of Carleton University’s MBA Iran program.
Carleton has offered a Master of Business Administration program in Iran for more than 10 years, graduating about 400 students since 2001.
New enrolment in the program was suspended in December based on an assessment of “feasibility and logistics,” said university spokesman Steven Reid.
The last cohort of Iranian MBA students completed their course work in Ottawa earlier this week. Tuition for the program was about $24,000.
Canada imposed a series of escalating economic sanctions on Iran beginning in July 2010. The sanctions now block virtually all financial transactions with Iran.
Meanwhile, Roland Paris, founding director of the University of Ottawa’s Centre for International Policy Studies, called the decision to cut all diplomatic relations with Iran “excessive.”
“The purpose of an embassy is to maintain channels of communication with other governments, including those whose policies we may abhor,” he said.
“Embassies also serve as Canada’s eyes and ears. With no diplomatic presence in Iran at all, it will be even harder for Ottawa to gather information on what is happening within Iran.
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