In February of 2008, then Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day renewed the security certificates on five men that CSIS deemed to be threats to national security. A Supreme Court decision in 2007 had forced the Harper government to revise the relevant legislation and reissue the certificates within a year. With the deadline approaching, it fell to Day to sign off on them.
Since then, two of the certificates have been quashed by the courts. A challenge against a third, issued against Mohamed Mahjoub, was the occasion this past week for Day to appear in Federal Court in a Toronto courtroom means of a videolink from Vancouver. It was Mahjoub’s lawyers who had requested the former minister’s testimony. They wanted him to explain how he determined that Mahjoub was such a danger to Canadians that it was necessary to abandon due process and rely on a security certificate for the authority . . . → Read More: Peace, order and good government, eh?: It seemed like a good idea at the time