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Khadr filed a $20-million civil suit against the federal government in 2013.

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Goodale said the government has already spent nearly $5 million on legal expenses and proceeding with the civil suit would have cost millions more “with virtually no chance of success.”

He said the Liberals were left to clean up Harper’s mess. “Despite the Supreme Court of Canada, the Harper government refused to repatriate Mr. Khadr or otherwise resolve the matter,” Goodale told reporters. “They could have, but they didn’t.”

In fact, the Harper government did bring Khadr back to Canada in 2012, albeit reluctantly.

In Calgary, Harper’s successor as Conservative leader said Khadr’s repatriation was a remedy in and of itself, and no further compensation should have been required. “That’s where this story should have ended,” Andrew Scheer said.

He was quick to pass the buck back to the Liberals, who were in power under former prime minister Jean Chrétien when Khadr was sent to Guantanamo in 2002.

“I know that Trudeau wants to blame the previous government, but this situation started under a Liberal government,” he said.

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But it’s that kind of posturing that has produced this outcome, says a Canadian political scientist.

“The Liberals don’t have much ground to be pointing at the Conservatives. Similarly, the Conservatives foot-dragged on bringing Khadr back from Guantanamo Bay,” Emmett Macfarlane, an associate professor of political science at the University of Waterloo, said in an interview. “It’s very difficult to see how the government could have come out on the winning side of this.”