Canada’s political summer is ending as it began — with talk of multimillion-dollar payouts to highly controversial characters.

Mike Duffy is not Omar Khadr, but the senator and former journalist also wants to be compensated for how he was treated by his own government and let down by the Canadian legal system.

He’s suing the Senate and RCMP for $7.8 million in lost income and damages and, like Khadr, is making a case — quite possibly a convincing one — that his basic rights as a citizen were trampled by base, crass politics.

Get ready, then, for another polarizing, national argument over the price of politicizing the country’s justice system. Such debates have been the bookends for the summer of 2017, and probably should leave us with lingering questions about where political interference has played havoc with law and order. This isn’t happening in some other country — it happened in Canada.

At the beginning of July, Canadians were locked in fierce debate over whether Khadr, the former child soldier and prisoner at Guantanamo, was owed a $10-million settlement for successive, Liberal and Conservative governments’ failure to protect his legal rights.

As August winds down, the public can now argue over whether Duffy is owed compensation for his descent into political infamy, which started in 2013 and carried on right to his total exoneration in April 2016.

In both cases, the men have powerful court rulings on their side, which may not quiet the critics, but definitely tilt the balance in their favour.

Duffy, according to Justice Charles Vaillancourt’s ruling 18 months ago, was the victim of a “mind-boggling and shocking” abuse in the democratic system. The abuse started at the top, specifically Stephen Harper’s PMO, which appears to have turned Duffy into political roadkill — with the help of a spineless RCMP and Senate — to quell a fuss over expenses in the red chamber. The whole sorry tale is recapped in the 50-page statement of claim filed with Ontario Superior Court on Thursday, with colourful descriptions of political treachery: “forced scenario” and “mistake-repay strategy,” for instance.

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The Prime Minister’s Office, under new management since late 2015, is not being sued by Duffy, but the Senate and the RCMP are. The lawsuit, and Duffy’s lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, mince no words in alleging that the national police force went after a Canadian citizen to suit a political agenda. That’s not a trifling accusation; we tend to assume that this is the kind of thing that happens in political thrillers or banana republics.

But Greenspon was pretty clear at his press conference on Thursday. “When the RCMP are perceived to have been taking their marching orders from the Prime Minister’s Office and/or the Senate, that’s a very dangerous road for the RCMP to be going down.”

Duffy, the journalist, was not known for his discretion. But in his more recent role as disgraced-then-vindicated senator, he has been extremely and uncharacteristically quiet since his trial ended in 2016. No whispered asides to his old journalist friends; no big leaks of his plans for revenge.

The longer he remained silent, in fact, the more that people suspected that something was up; that the “ol’ Duff,” as he liked to call himself, was amassing a case against those who had wronged him.

“It also took me a long time to draft up a 50-page statement of claim. My goodness, it’s one of the longer ones I’ve ever done, I’ve got to say,” Greenspon told reporters.

Apart from everything else, that statement is also the first real, personal glimpse we’ve had into how Duffy has been doing since his legal troubles began.

His former lawyer, Donald Bayne, had said he feared for his client’s life throughout the legal ordeal. The statement lays out the medical details: a second round of open-heart surgery (which the statement describes as “extensive and significant”); depression; severe anxiety; insomnia; and a worsening of his diabetes, specifically, a loss of vision.

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As Duffy’s new lawyer put it at the press conference on Thursday, his client “near died” from the stress. Being an enemy of the state is a dangerous condition.

There is one big difference between Duffy and Khadr: Duffy’s troubles began when he got too friendly with the government; Khadr when he got involved with an enemy abroad. But both found out what happens when a citizen becomes politically inconvenient to the PMO.

It’s said that the real test of commitment to basic rights is whether we can defend them for people we don’t like. In the case of Khadr and Duffy, the top politicians in Canada failed the test, but that doesn’t mean citizens have to do the same.

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