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CSIS and the Canadian Entrapment Factory: A Pattern of Orchestrated Threats

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  • October 23, 2026
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Canadian court file and factory silhouette — CSIS informant cases and duty-of-candour failures.
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Court File No. CV-20-00645492-0000
Equibit Group Ltd. v. Attorney General of Canada et al.
Related: CSIS Secret Federal Court Warrants and Duty of Candour · Statement of Claim Against CSIS

Since the post-9/11 era, Canada has seen a series of high-profile national security cases that, upon closer judicial scrutiny, show heavy involvement by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the RCMP. Equibit Group’s position is that, in several of these cases, intelligence agencies did not merely monitor threats but helped create or encourage them. The record is more specific: in the Nuttall and Korody case, the courts found that the RCMP manufactured the crime, and no court has found that CSIS directed it.

This post provides detailed overviews of ten notable cases. For those new to these stories, each includes direct links to primary court documents and mainstream reporting.

What Are Security Certificates?

Security Certificates are a controversial parallel legal mechanism under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. They allow the government to detain non-citizens (and in some cases affect citizens) based on secret intelligence evidence that the accused and their lawyers are not fully allowed to see. CSIS often supplies the secret evidence. These certificates have been widely criticized for violating fundamental principles of due process and fair trial rights.

For more on how CSIS uses secret Federal Court warrants and has been repeatedly criticized for breaching its Duty of Candor, see our post: CSIS Secret Federal Court Warrants & Breaches of Candor.

1. Toronto 18 (2006)

In June 2006, police arrested 17 people in a series of raids across southern Ontario; an 18th was detained two months later. The group was accused of planning truck bombings at the Toronto Stock Exchange, a CSIS office in Toronto, and an Ontario military base. Two informants were at the center of the investigation. Mubin Shaikh was recruited by CSIS in 2004 as a “directed source” assigned to penetrate the group; in 2005 CSIS handed the case, and Shaikh, to the RCMP, where he became a paid police agent. The RCMP paid him $300,000 after he sought far more. A second informant, Shaher Elsohemy, met with CSIS before becoming a paid RCMP agent; he initially asked for $15 million and was offered up to $3.99 million, a package reported in court as more than $4 million. In March 2009, Justice John Sproat ruled that a youth convicted in the case had not been entrapped by Shaikh and that there had been no abuse of process. Seven adults pleaded guilty, four people were convicted at trial, and charges against seven others were stayed or dropped. Zakaria Amara, described as the plot’s main organizer, was sentenced to life in prison in January 2010. In 2011, a WikiLeaks-released U.S. cable showed that CSIS had placed Shaikh himself on a list of people suspected of “terrorist-related activity” provided to the U.S. government.

2. VIA Rail Plot (2013)

Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser were arrested in April 2013 by Canadian police, accused of plotting to derail a VIA Rail passenger train traveling between New York and Toronto. At the center of the case was an undercover FBI agent, known in court as Tamer El-Noury, working with the RCMP. Under cross-examination, the agent conceded that his first meeting with Esseghaier, presented as a chance encounter, was arranged as part of an existing investigation, and he testified that he spent hundreds if not thousands of hours with him. The agent rented a “safe house” that police had bugged, paid for meals, drove the two men to scouting locations, and handed out cash. The trial judge, Justice Michael Code, told jurors that the most important evidence was 25 hours of secretly recorded conversations with the agent. Code also took unusual steps to protect the agent’s identity: he testified under an alias, and the media were ordered not to report that the name was not his own. Both men were convicted in March 2015 and sentenced to life in prison in September 2015. At sentencing, Code rejected Jaser’s argument that he had been entrapped, finding that both men were predisposed to violence before the agent was introduced.

3. John Nuttall & Amanda Korody – Victoria Legislature Bomb Plot (2013)

On July 1, 2013, John Nuttall and Amanda Korody placed three inert pressure cooker devices on the grounds of the B.C. Legislature. The devices had been built with the help of the RCMP, whose undercover officers had guided the couple for five months. A jury convicted them in June 2015. In July 2016, Justice Catherine Bruce of the B.C. Supreme Court stayed the proceedings, finding that “the manufacture of the crime by the police amounted to entrapment” (R. v. Nuttall, 2016 BCSC 1404, para. 780). In December 2018, the B.C. Court of Appeal unanimously upheld the stays, calling the overall conduct of the investigation “a travesty of justice” (R. v. Nuttall, 2018 BCCA 479, para. 441). CBC News’s reports on the 2016 stay and the 2018 appeal minimized CSIS’s role; they do not mention the CSIS letters or CSIS surveillance. The trial decision records more. CSIS was investigating Nuttall before the RCMP was (2016 BCSC 1404, paras. 19–21). At the outset, the RCMP had no evidence of criminal activity “apart from what was contained in the CSIS advisory letter” (para. 24). CSIS ran its own surveillance in parallel (paras. 23, 139, 298). At weekly meetings, the RCMP kept CSIS informed of the undercover officer’s contact with the couple, in what the court called “almost exclusively a one-way sharing of information because CSIS rarely revealed its intelligence” (para. 29). No decision finds that CSIS directed the undercover operation; the entrapment findings concern the RCMP. CSIS and the Nuttall Case examines CSIS’s role in the case in detail.

4. Mohamed Harkat (Security Certificate, 2002–ongoing)

Mohamed Harkat, an Algerian refugee living in Ottawa, was taken into custody in December 2002 under a security certificate alleging ties to al-Qaeda. He has denied any involvement in terrorism. He spent years in detention and later under house arrest. In proceedings on the second certificate, it emerged that CSIS had destroyed original recordings of intercepted conversations under its internal policy OPS-217, leaving only summaries. In 2012, the Federal Court of Appeal excluded some of those summaries and held that CSIS human sources do not enjoy blanket privilege. In May 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the security certificate regime and Harkat’s certificate. It agreed that CSIS sources have no blanket privilege and allowed the summaries to remain in evidence despite the destruction of the original recordings. In 2018, a delegate of the immigration minister concluded that Harkat should not be allowed to remain in Canada. In June 2026, the Federal Court set that decision aside, ruling that the delegate’s key finding, that Harkat was complicit in terrorism committed by Chechen extremists, was “not reasonably supported” by the record and rested in part on speculation, and ordered a fresh review.

5. Adil Charkaoui (Security Certificate)

Adil Charkaoui, a Montreal permanent resident, was arrested in 2003 under a security certificate alleging ties to al-Qaeda. He spent nearly two years in detention and years more under strict release conditions, including an ankle bracelet, without being charged with any criminal offence. In June 2008, the Supreme Court of Canada reprimanded CSIS for destroying the original notes of its interviews with Charkaoui and providing only summaries, and ruled that CSIS must retain such material (Charkaoui II). After the Federal Court ordered disclosure of parts of the case, the government withdrew evidence rather than disclose it, citing national security. In August 2009, it told the court that the remaining evidence was too weak to support the certificate. In October 2009, Justice Danièle Tremblay-Lamer quashed the certificate. CSIS said it stood by the accuracy and reliability of the information it had submitted.

6. Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin, and Ahmad El Maati

In September 2002, U.S. authorities detained Maher Arar, an Ottawa engineer, and removed him to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured. The Commission of Inquiry led by Justice Dennis O’Connor reported in September 2006 that there was “no evidence” Arar had committed any offence or posed a threat to Canada. The commission found that the RCMP gave U.S. authorities information about Arar that was inaccurate, portrayed him in an unfairly negative fashion, and overstated his importance, and that U.S. authorities “very likely” relied on it. It found no evidence that Canadian officials participated in the U.S. decision and stated that CSIS did not share information with the Americans at that time. It also found that Canadian agencies relied on information from Syria that was likely the product of torture, and that officials leaked confidential and sometimes inaccurate information to damage Arar’s reputation. In January 2007, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to Arar, and the government paid $10.5 million in compensation. A second inquiry, led by former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci, reported in October 2008 that Almalki, El Maati, and Nureddin were tortured abroad and that actions of CSIS and the RCMP indirectly contributed to their mistreatment. In March 2017, the government settled with the three men and apologized for “any role Canadian officials may have played” in their detention and mistreatment.

7. Air India Bombing Inquiry (1985 – ongoing fallout)

On June 23, 1985, a bomb destroyed Air India Flight 182, killing 329 people, in what the federal inquiry called the worst mass murder in Canadian history. CSIS had wiretapped Talwinder Singh Parmar, a prime suspect, in the months before the bombing, and later erased hundreds of hours of those recordings; only some written summaries survived. A retired CSIS official told the inquiry in 2007 that erasing the tapes was default policy and that he deeply regretted it. At the 2003 Air India trial, defense lawyers forced the government to concede that the erasure was “unacceptable negligence.” In June 2010, the inquiry led by retired Supreme Court justice John Major reported a “cascading series of errors” by government, the RCMP, and CSIS. It found that the RCMP and CSIS together held information that would have led a competent analyst to conclude that Flight 182 was at high risk, that their sharing of intelligence was “wholly deficient,” and that after the bombing CSIS often failed to promptly disclose relevant information to the RCMP.

8. Omar Khadr

Omar Khadr, a Toronto-born Canadian, was 15 when he was captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and taken to Guantanamo Bay. In 2003 and 2004, CSIS and Foreign Affairs officials interviewed him there and shared the results with U.S. authorities. In January 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously that Canada had violated his Charter rights: “The interrogation of a youth detained without access to counsel, to elicit statements about serious criminal charges while knowing that the youth had been subjected to sleep deprivation and while knowing that the fruits of the interrogations would be shared with the prosecutors, offends the most basic Canadian standards.” Khadr later confessed, under interrogation later deemed “oppressive,” to killing a U.S. Army medic. In July 2017, the government settled his civil suit for $10.5 million, and the ministers of foreign affairs and public safety apologized “for any role Canadian officials may have played in relation to his ordeal abroad and any resulting harm.”

9. Aaron Driver (2016)

Aaron Driver, 24, came onto CSIS’s radar for his online activities a couple of years after moving to Winnipeg in 2012, according to his brother. In February 2016, a Winnipeg court placed him under a terrorism peace bond for openly supporting ISIS on social media, and he moved to Strathroy, Ontario. On August 10, 2016, the FBI tipped off the RCMP about a person potentially planning an attack in Canada; the RCMP identified Driver from a “martyrdom video” and said he planned an attack within 72 hours on an urban center. Police surrounded the taxi he had entered, he detonated an explosive device in the back seat, and he was shot and killed. An autopsy showed he died from an RCMP bullet. Afterward, the case raised public questions about whether police should have done more to enforce the peace bond.

10. Online Radicalization and Undercover Stings (2014–2017)

During the period of ISIS recruitment, the RCMP used undercover operations against suspects identified online. In the case of Ismael Habib of Gatineau, Quebec, the RCMP ran a “Mr. Big” operation in which an undercover officer posed as a crime boss selling fake passports. Habib told the officer it was his “duty” to fight alongside ISIS in Syria. He was arrested in February 2016. Habib testified that he had said what he thought the officer wanted to hear in order to get a passport. In March 2017, Quebec court Judge Serge Délisle ruled that the RCMP had not broken the rules and that the confession was admissible. In June 2017, Habib became the first adult convicted at trial of attempting to leave Canada to participate in the activities of a terrorist group, and in September 2017 he was sentenced to nine years. The Nuttall and Korody case (section 3) remains the case in which entrapment succeeded. The federal government’s annual public reports on the terrorist threat for this period are published by Public Safety Canada.

Duty of Candour and Recurring Patterns

Read together, the ten cases above document several recurring features. Each is stated below as the record shows it. Where Equibit Group Ltd. takes a position the courts have not ruled on, it is labeled as Equibit Group’s position.

  1. Informants and undercover officers at the center of the case
    In the Toronto 18 case, Mubin Shaikh was recruited by CSIS as a directed source and later became a paid RCMP agent; Justice John Sproat ruled in 2009 that he had not entrapped the youth convicted in the case. In the VIA Rail case, an undercover FBI agent working with the RCMP arranged his first meeting with Chiheb Esseghaier; Justice Michael Code rejected the entrapment argument. In the Nuttall and Korody case, the B.C. Supreme Court found that the RCMP had entrapped the couple, and the B.C. Court of Appeal upheld that ruling (2016 BCSC 1404; 2018 BCCA 479). In the Habib case, a Quebec judge ruled that the RCMP’s “Mr. Big” operation had not broken the rules.
  2. Breach of the duty of candour
    The Federal Court has found that CSIS breached its duty of candour to the court in warrant proceedings. In 2016 FC 1105, the court found that CSIS had not told it that it was retaining associated data collected under warrants. In 2020 FC 616, the court found that CSIS had not disclosed that information in its warrant applications was likely derived from illegal activity. These are other files, cited as published jurisprudence.
  3. Secret evidence in the security certificate regime
    In Harkat, CSIS destroyed original intercept recordings under its policy OPS-217, and the Supreme Court of Canada held in 2014 that CSIS human sources have no blanket privilege. In June 2026, the Federal Court set aside the finding that Harkat was complicit in terrorism as “not reasonably supported” by the record. In Charkaoui, the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that CSIS must retain its interview notes; the certificate was quashed in 2009 after the government withdrew evidence rather than disclose it.
  4. Destruction or withholding of evidence
    CSIS erased hundreds of hours of Air India wiretap recordings, and the Major inquiry found intelligence sharing between CSIS and the RCMP “wholly deficient.” CSIS destroyed interview notes in Charkaoui and original recordings in Harkat. In Nuttall, the trial court recorded that weekly meetings with CSIS were “almost exclusively a one-way sharing of information because CSIS rarely revealed its intelligence” (2016 BCSC 1404, para. 29).
  5. Vulnerable targets
    In Nuttall, the court found that “the RCMP knowingly exploited the demonstrated vulnerabilities of the defendants in order to induce them to commit the offences” (2016 BCSC 1404, para. 769) and wrote: “We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people who have neither the capacity nor sufficient motivation to do it themselves” (para. 836). In Khadr, the Supreme Court of Canada found that interrogating a detained youth who had been subjected to sleep deprivation “offends the most basic Canadian standards.”
  6. Coverage and the record
    In Nuttall, CBC News’s reports on the 2016 stay and the 2018 appeal do not mention the CSIS letters or CSIS surveillance, which the trial decision records in detail (2016 BCSC 1404, paras. 19–29, 52, 139, 298).

Equibit Group’s position is that these features reflect an institutional culture within CSIS, and in RCMP units working with it, that builds cases around the people it watches, under broad powers and limited effective oversight. No court has made that finding. The record cited in each section above is what Equibit Group relies on.

Place in the Equibit Record

Equibit Group’s position is that several people in these cases were themselves targets, not only suspects. Beside that position is the record:

  • Nuttall and Korody. Equibit Group’s position is that John Nuttall was groomed by people directed or influenced by CSIS. The trial record shows that CSIS was investigating Nuttall before the RCMP (2016 BCSC 1404, paras. 19–21). The record also shows that the only evidence of criminal activity the RCMP had at the outset was the unsourced CSIS advisory letter (paras. 24, 52), and that the RCMP kept CSIS informed of the undercover officer’s contact with the couple (para. 29). CSIS and the Crown also sought to keep the identity of a possible human source from the public (2016 BCSC 73, para. 14). No court has ruled on whether that person was a CSIS source or what role, if any, that person played. The entrapment findings concern the RCMP.
  • Toronto 18. Mubin Shaikh began as a CSIS directed source assigned to penetrate the group, and CSIS handed the case and Shaikh to the RCMP, which paid him $300,000. A second informant, Shaher Elsohemy, met with CSIS before becoming a paid RCMP agent.
  • Online and undercover cases. In Habib, an undercover RCMP officer posing as a crime boss offered a fake passport, and the court admitted the resulting confession.

Equibit Group’s position is that Chris Horlacher, a Chartered Accountant and technology founder, is the target of a campaign it describes, by analogy, as Zersetzung-style. It relies less on recruiting a vulnerable person into a plot than on institutional pressure, financial pressure, and technical interference. Those allegations are pleaded in four lawsuits at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice:

Why the Pattern Matters

These documented patterns should instruct every Canadian to approach official national security narratives with deep skepticism. Equibit Group’s position is that CSIS and the RCMP have repeatedly manufactured or heavily encouraged threats, and that every new “foiled plot” and every targeting of a dissident innovator must be scrutinized. The courts have made a narrower finding: in Nuttall and Korody, the B.C. courts found that the RCMP manufactured the crime (2016 BCSC 1404; 2018 BCCA 479); no court has found that CSIS directed that operation.

The Equibit lawsuit offers a rare, well-documented window into how these tactics are allegedly deployed against non-violent, high-achieving Canadians who challenge institutional power.

The public deserves transparency — not more secret warrants and closed-door operations.

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Equibit Group Ltd.

Equibit Group Ltd.

Blockchain Protocol Developer

Equibit Group Ltd. is a Canadian technology company that built secure, decentralized infrastructure for securities issuance and peer-to-peer trading. It is now the plaintiff in civil litigation over alleged sabotage of that work, and this account publishes the case updates, filings and evidence documentation for this website.
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