OTTAWA—Canada has suspended diplomatic ties with Iran, plunging relations between the two nations to their worst level in years and raising fears about the fate of Canadians on death row in the Middle East nation.

In a surprise move Friday, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird announced that Canada was closing its embassy in Tehran and expelling Iranian diplomats from Canada as it formally declared Iran a state sponsor of terrorism.

Baird branded Iran as the “most significant threat to global peace and security in the world today.”

He cited a list of long-standing beefs with the regime in Tehran as justification for the abrupt move, including Iranian military assistance to Syria and its refusal to comply with United Nations resolutions on its nuclear program.

“It routinely threatens the existence of Israel and engages in racist anti-Semitic rhetoric and incitement to genocide; it is among the world’s worst violators of human rights,” Baird told reporters in Vladivostok, Russia.

Pressed on why Canada decided to act now on grievances it’s had for months and years, Baird said only, “There’s just a long list of reasons why we’re coming to this decision.”

But he said the main motivation was an attack on the British embassy in Tehran nine months ago and worries that Canadian diplomats were in danger.

“It just got to a point where we just are very uncomfortable putting their lives at risk, and I’ll tell you . . . this is a decision obviously we don’t take lightly,” said Baird as he arrived in the Russian city for a meeting of APEC leaders.

Yet the sudden decision immediately provoked speculation that the long-discussed military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities by Israel and others was imminent, a suggestion that Baird’s office later sought to downplay.

The decision was announced after a skeleton staff of about eight Canadian foreign affairs employees had already returned home from Iran. There are about 17 workers in the Iranian embassy and they’ve been given five days to leave Canada, a foreign affairs official said.

The federal government is also urging Canadians to avoid travel to Iran.

A spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, Ramin Mehmanparast, called Canada’s decision “hasty and extreme” and said that Iran would soon respond, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

But the diplomatic ousting won applause in other quarters, including from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I congratulate Canada’s (Prime Minister Stephen) Harper for showing leadership and making a bold move that sends a clear message to Iran and the world,” said Netanyahu, who had discussed his concerns about Iran with Harper during a March visit to Ottawa.

The Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran, an Iranian dissident group, also endorsed the action and urged European and Middle East countries to follow Canada’s lead.

“Severing relations with the religious dictatorship ruling Iran and standing by the Iranian people . . . are the only way to rid the world of a terrorist and fundamentalist regime,” the group said in a statement.

But the suspension of ties does raise fears that two Canadians awaiting execution in Iranian prison — Hamid Ghassemi-Shall and Saeed Malekpour — could be at risk amid the diplomatic jousting.

Relations between Ottawa and Tehran have soured since the death of Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi in 2003 in Evin prison. But Friday’s move underscores a sharp deterioration of relations in recent months. In late April, Ottawa closed the visa office in the Tehran embassy, a decision Iran called “unfriendly.”

The latest move also comes amid accusations that officials working out of the Iranian embassy in Ottawa have been attempting to infiltrate the Iranian community in Canada.

“These activities using cultural organizations, student groups, as fronts have seen to be aimed at infiltrating the Iranian diaspora and neutralizing opposition to the regime,” said Payam Akhavan, a law professor at McGill University and founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre.

“Many of us involved in human rights activities have had to contend with the infiltration of our community by individuals who are effectively agents of the regime,” he said in an interview Friday.

Still, he joined other experts in questioning whether Ottawa’s decision to cut ties altogether was the right one, saying it would leave Canada in the dark about developments in the country.

“I would have thought that an outright closure may have not necessarily been the best option as opposed to a very serious downgrading of relations,” he said. “I think it’s important to isolate the regime, but at the same time, it’s important to leave some lines of communication open.”

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But he also urged targeted action — sanctions and travel bans — against Iranian regime insiders he says are living in Canada and funnelling millions of dollars through the country’s real estate market.

“The bigger issue for me is that while we take this sort of symbolic action, we’ve largely turned a blind eye to the massive amounts of money that is being laundered in the real estate market in Toronto, Vancouver,” Akhavan said.

Still, many others were left scratching their heads, wondering what prompted Canada to act now.

“I’m really puzzled . . . I don’t see the closure benefitting anyone,” said Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist who was held for 118 days in a Tehran prison in 2009.

Unless Canadian diplomats were in imminent danger or federal officials had fresh evidence of wrongdoing by Iranian diplomats in Canada, Bahari said he can’t see any reason for the move.

“The fact that the Iranian government is a nasty regime, we’ve known that for the past 33 years,” he said in an interview.

And he cautioned that the withdrawal of diplomats will impede Canada’s ability to help the Canadians on death row, even though Iran does not recognize their dual citizenship.

Still, Bahari said he doubts that the Iranian regime will exact reprisals by proceeding with the executions, calling the government “cynically pragmatic.”

“I think they are going to play the victim in this case,” he said.

Houchang Hassan-Yari, an expert on the Middle East with Queen’s University and the Royal Military College, predicted a long period of diplomatic chilliness between the two countries as a result of Friday’s actions.

“It will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the Canadian government to go back and re-establish relations in Iran in the absence of any tangible move by the Iranian government in those areas of concerns,” he said in an interview.

He said the motivation for acting now may simply have been exasperation in the face of Iran’s continued intransigence.

“It might also be a sign of frustration for the Canadian government that they do not expect anything positive coming out of Tehran,” Hassan-Yari said.

With files from The Canadian Press

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