Canada’s FIFA exclusion of Palestinians and Iranians reveals a lethal double standard

At an important meeting to kick off the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Vancouver today, there are notable absences: at least one member of the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) and the entire Iranian Football Federation (IFF) delegation.

In the case of the PFA, the president, general secretary, and legal counsel Gonzalo Boye all initially did not receive visas from Canada to attend the April 30 FIFA Congress. PFA vice-president Susan Shalabi was awarded a visa after she applied on a non-Palestinian passport. 

Then, Canada suddenly shifted positions, granting the PFA president and general secretary a visa just days before the Congress. Boye’s visa still hasn’t been granted and the PFA president’s visa came so late, he could not travel with the rest of the delegation. Shalabi noted that the visas were ultimately issued only because of pressure “on the political level, on the social level, on the media level.” 

The Iranian delegation was not so fortunate, as they were initially granted visas on Monday, travelled to Toronto, and were ultimately denied at point of entry, ostensibly on the grounds that the IFF president was a former member of a “listed terrorist entity.”

That these stories made global news in the first place is worthy of comment. Only the extravagant spectacle of the upcoming FIFA World Cup could make major news out of the otherwise normalized, even banal, acts of bureaucratic violence routinely inflicted upon Palestinians by Canada. Anti-Palestinian racism is so ingrained in the political fabric of this country that it amounts to a mere matter of paperwork. 

While visas for the Palestinian and Iranian delegation are scrutinized, similar investigations are not made of Israeli delegations who enter Canada. In September 2025, Israel played in Davis Cup qualifying matches in Halifax. Despite calls for members of the delegation—current and former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers—to be investigated for potential war crimes, the only people subjected to surveillance and criminalization were the local community members who protested the games. It is notable who qualifies as a “terrorist,” and who does not.

Only days after the Davis Cup matches were played in a closed venue without spectators due to “security concerns,” the Israel-Premier Tech team competed in the Montreal cycling Grand Prix. Yet again, a heavy police presence was mobilized against residents and not against the team, who bill themselves as “ambassadors” of Israel. 

By now, pointing out these double standards in the treatment of Palestinians has become depressingly routine. As Toronto prepares to host FIFA games, it’s clear that Canada is carefully selecting its global audience. This most recent fiasco of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is not a mere logistical hiccup, but rather exposes a gapingly hypocritical geopolitical wound. 

Look closely at the architecture of Canadian admissibility. On the one hand, the IRCC has swiftly deployed concerns over “national security” to shut the door to Palestinians, pro-Palestine activists, and even members of the Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap, who were barred for taking a pro-Palestine stance.

Meanwhile, IDF soldiers and advocates are able to traverse our borders with startling ease. Consider the active presence of the IDF within Canadian borders. The Israeli military itself reported that, as of 2025, more than 1,500 people with Canadian citizenship were serving in its ranks. In fact, although it represents a violation of the Foreign Enlistment Act, which prohibits military forces of any foreign state to recruit within Canadian borders, for decades the IDF has been permitted to do just that at recruiting events held in consulates, universities, and religious institutions.

This is the system working overtime to enforce a deadly double standard. Palestinian-Canadians have waited more than two years for their families to be evacuated from Gaza. Canada capped applications at 5,000, compared to the fast-tracking of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees. But even that meagre allotment has seen fewer than 1,000 Gazans actually arrive in the country. 

These denials make stark the racist reality. Even Palestinians who meet the most normative standards—family members of people who immigrated the “right” way—are still labeled as a security threat. The so-called “Canadian values” that encourage immigration as a mechanism to uphold the capitalist state, undergirded by the nuclear family and by workers, fall apart when the subjects are Palestinians. 

Similarly, sports are held up as a supposedly neutral and depoliticized example of global unity and shared humanity. But as the FIFA debacle shows, far from being “open to the world,” the World Cup spectacle in Canada is yet another mechanism by which the brown and Black people of the world are policed, surveilled, criminalized, and painted as a threat to the white Western nation. 

One of the most lethal forms of this double standard is the administrative purgatory imposed on students from Gaza admitted to Canadian universities. More than 130 Palestinian students accepted into Canadian schools have been forced to wait for well over 20 months because they are required to submit biometric data that they are not even permitted to leave Gaza to obtain. 

In a particularly tragic but eminently foreseeable case, twin sisters Sally and Dalia Ghazi Ibaid were killed in an Israeli airstrike while their Canadian study permit applications were still being processed. These deaths are rendered unnoteworthy, lost in the fervour of a football spectacle in which Canada waives biometric requirements for most FIFA delegates to ease their travel across our borders. 

In the eyes of the IRCC, a student surviving genocide in Gaza is a permanent security risk, while a soldier from an occupying army is a welcomed neighbour. 

The paperwork violence of the Canadian state’s immigration system thrives on the veneer of “objective” automated bureaucracy. Canada’s denial of visas speaks to a broader reality of Canada’s “polite” racism, manifested in a foreign policy that bills itself as the kinder, gentler, peace-keeping alternative to the United States’ aggressive empire-building. 

Though it bills itself as a global host of the World Cup, Canada is acting more like a lapdog of the United States. After Iranian soccer officials were turned back at the Canadian border yesterday, Canadian officials have been hiding behind the paperwork, with Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand hedging that the refusal might have been an accident. It’s an echo of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s incoherent response to the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, in which he first endorsed strikes on Tehran, then admitted they were illegal under international law, then refused to rule out sending soldiers to support the U.S.

Canada uses its quiet, hidden, bureaucratic violence to enjoy a reputation of remaining above the fray. While the U.S. sends Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to FIFA games, we vote against closing the loophole that would prevent weapons from flowing through the U.S. to end up dropping bombs on Gaza. And then we turn around and commit more funding to the military, citing the threat to our own security from the same United States we just voted to arm.

Rather than deploying soldiers to shoot hungry Palestinians at food sites, we create a paperwork snarl that denies entry for years on end as illusory cover. And with a few taps of  a keyboard we delay visas and label Palestinians as terrorists, the same designation that justifies the wholesale murder of journalists, medical and aid workers, and entire populations. And when we reverse decisions at the last minute we can remain smug, offering toothless “condemnations” that never lead to action while believing ourselves to be more moral, more rational, more measured, and certainly less violent. 

The curation of who is allowed to exist in Canada reveals a stark hierarchy of humanity. If the Canadian government can flag a hip hop group like Kneecap or a football delegation as a threat to national values, yet remain silent on the entry of those participating in documented war crimes, then the system is simply not protecting Canadians. 

If we are truly inviting the world to our doorstep, we must answer for the gatekeepers. A tournament that courts a reputation for inclusivity simply cannot ignore the bureaucratic wall it has erected against those whose very existence is deemed a political inconvenience. The integrity of the 2026 FIFA World Cup hinges on whether Canada chooses to be a genuine global host or merely a vassal state of the U.S.A. We cannot celebrate the beautiful game while the ink on our visas remains a tool of colonial management and control.

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El Jones is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics, Economics, and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax.

Derek Silva is a professor of sociology at King’s University College at Western University and co-host of The End of Sport podcast.

Carolyn Prouse is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s University and co-organizer of the 2026 World Cup Watch platform.

Nathan Kalman-Lamb is an associate professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick and co-host of The End of Sport podcast.

Daniel Sailofsky is an assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Toronto.