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The long and extraordinary saga of Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen detained in Sudan on suspicion of involvement with al-Qaeda, is far from over. His repatriation to Canada, forced on a reluctant Harper government by a strong Federal Court ruling, does not mean his personal nightmare is over. Not only will he have to readjust to life in Canada after six years in forced exile, but he will have many watchers, some distinctly unfriendly, crowding in on his life in Montreal.

The media will want his story and expect a repeat of Maher Arar's compelling account of his time in prison in Syria. The Canadian authorities may keep him under surveillance. And the Americans will play a large role in determining his fate.

The public record of Mr. Abdelrazik's case indicates that it was the Bush administration that placed him on a no-fly list in 2004, thereby thwarting his return to Canada from Sudan. The U.S. government subsequently upped the ante in 2006 by having his name added to the United Nations Security Council watch list of al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects. That put Mr. Abdelrazik in a Kafkaesque situation - unable to clear his name but equally unable to travel or earn any money.

An effort by the Canadian government to have his name removed from the list was denied, for reasons unknown. Our government was reduced to begging the UN 1267 committee, so named for the Security Council resolution that created the list, for an exemption that would allow Ottawa to take care of Mr. Abdelrazik's basic needs while he was holed up in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum.

It is now incumbent on the U.S. to either agree to his delisting as a terror suspect or to charge him and try to have him extradited from Canada to face trial. This should be a test case for the Obama administration. If the U.S. seeks extradition, Mr. Abdelrazik will have the protection of the Canadian courts, which would have the power to decide whether the U.S. case was reasonable. If the U.S. does not seek extradition, then it will be up to the Canadian government to put strong pressure on both its American ally and the Security Council to have Mr. Abdelrazik's status changed.

The track record of Canadian governments with respect to the power or even willingness to try to change American minds on terror cases is not, alas, reassuring - witness Mr. Arar (who remains on a U.S. no-fly list) and Omar Khadr (who is the only Westerner still imprisoned in Guantanamo).

But Ottawa now has a bit of breathing space to invent a new policy toward Mr. Abdelrazik, given that the old one has blown up in its face. The clock is ticking until the resumption of Parliament in the fall, at which point the Harper government can expect fireworks and an investigation by the House of Commons foreign affairs committee. The best course would be to bring the Security Intelligence Review Committee fully to the fore, publicize the terms of reference of its study of the Abdelrazik case, and set a deadline for a public report.

Depending on what SIRC, which has full investigative powers and can view cabinet documents, turns up, additional measures to get to the bottom of the Abdelrazik case may be required. But let's use the instruments we have created for the purpose of keeping our security agencies accountable and in check before we go to the next, expensive and laborious step.

While the Canadian public awaits the next bit of news, there are a few lessons to ponder, some good, some cautionary. The best news is that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms works as intended, even in a post-9/11 age, to protect the rights of Canadian citizens. Citizen and media activism (including the out-front reporting by The Globe's Paul Koring) helped keep the case alive.

But the cautionary stuff outweighs the good news. The Abdelrazik case points to the continued willingness of the U.S. to combat terrorism unilaterally, even at the expense of its friends. The treatment of Mr. Abdelrazik also suggests the illusory nature of many of the “grey area” options for dealing with terrorism suspects that governments seek to find between ongoing surveillance (expensive) and full criminal proceedings (difficult). You can't just maroon a citizen in a foreign land as a convenient middle course.

The Canadian government should know by now that terrorism cases always carry a potential for serious political damage. The only way to avoid that damage is to have a sound, independent policy that you are willing to defend in a substantive way in public. Maybe successive Canadian governments had such a policy toward Mr. Abdelrazik; if so, they have kept remarkably quiet about it. As one Foreign Affairs official presciently noted, the government's secretive and inconsistent handling of the Abdelrazik case has left it with “a lot of explaining to do.”

Finally, there's a minor lesson in how government works internally. It's time to change the culture that produces jaunty e-mails between BlackBerry-toting officials and bureaucrats. And it's time to wake up to the fact that e-mails are an official record and that maybe a little more time and thought should go into their composition – not just to cover the backside but to be, well, more thoughtful.

Wesley Wark is a security specialist at the University of Toronto.