A timeline
March 1990 Mohamed Harkat flees Algeria during a military crackdown of political opponents.
1995 Harkat arrives in Canada after living and working in Pakistan. He arrives in Toronto but quickly settles in Ottawa.
January 2001 He marries Sophie Lamarche. CSIS builds a case against him, using 13 wiretapped conversations recorded between 1996 and 1998 and two unnamed informants — one of which failed a lie-detector test.
Dec. 10, 2002 — Harkat is arrested, accused of being a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda. He is detained in prison for 42 months before being released to house arrest.
December 2010 — A Federal Court judge, Simon Noel, deems
Harkat a terrorist threat to national security. The judge ruled that the special immigration warrant — the security certificate — meets the standards of fairness in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and thus was constitutional. Noel said Harkat ran a guest house for Ibn Khattab, a Chechen rebel leader, and demonstrated “active membership” in the extremist bin Laden network. The judge also ruled that while in Canada “Harkat maintained existing contacts with Islamist extremists.
“I find that although the danger associated to Mr. Harkat has diminished over time, he still poses a danger to Canada, but at a lesser level,” Noel wrote. April 2012 — The Federal Court of Appeal overturned Noel’s decision, saying that Harkat’s right to a fair trail had been compromised.
May 2014 — The Supreme
Court of Canada overturned the Federal Court of Appeal’s decision and affirmed a decision that found Harkat to be an active member of the Al Qaeda terrorist network.
February 2016 — Alexandre Trudeau writes a letter to the Minister of Public Safety Ralph Goodale asking him to allow Harkat to stay in Canada. “I am absolutely convinced that at this moment, he poses no danger whatsoever to the public or to the public safety in Canada, but rather offers a positive commitment to the life here he has created,” Trudeau wrote in his letter. September — Lawyer Barbara Jackman will petition the minister of public safety to allow Harkat to stay in Canada because he faces torture and persecution back in Algeria.