Two stories involving Canadians landed on the front pages of The New York Times this week. Neither involved the weekslong saga of who said what to Jody Wilson-Raybould. Instead, both featured Canadians who had left Canada to join the Islamic State, and who now want to return home. They were written by Rukmini Callimachi, our expert on all things ISIS.

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Rukmini told me by phone while driving to the Baghdad airport earlier this week that the Canadian connection was a coincidence. She had gone to Syria in late January in part to speak with Mohammed Khalifa, a 35-year-old man from Toronto who was recently captured by American forces. The result was a chilling account of his time as the narrator of Islamic State propaganda videos.

[Read: The English Voice of ISIS Comes Out of the Shadows]

Then, unexpectedly, Rukmini met Kimberly Gwen Polman, another caliphate member who was born in Hamilton, Ontario. Ms. Polman, who also holds American citizenship, talked about her decision in an article Rukmini wrote along with Catherine Porter, our colleague in Toronto.

[Read: 2 American Wives of ISIS Militants Want to Return Home]

Here’s some of my conversation with Rukmini about the situation of Canadians who left the country to join ISIS. It has been edited for clarity and space:

What lies ahead for these people?

A period of legal limbo. We have seen that Canada is apparently doing very little to bring these people home.

Khalifa has now been in captivity for months and nobody from the Canadian government has come to him.

Regarding Kimberly, I think that she was open to being interviewed in that she initially identified herself as Canadian to American officials in the desert when ISIS members were surrendering because she was under the impression that Canada would be more lenient to people like her.

She then got to the camp and she started hearing stories of Canadians who has been in limbo for a long time. She learned that Americans are at least repatriating their citizens even though most of them are being repatriated directly to jail. So I think she had a change of heart and decided to identify through her other nationality in the hope that she can get out of there.

Is it a matter of Canada not knowing what to do with ISIS members when they return?

That’s my best guess, but Canadian law enforcement is pretty opaque in explaining their strategy.

We saw with the Canadian subject of the podcast that The New York Times did, that even when you have a person who has confessed on tape to carrying out crime, the lack of actual forensic evidence made it such that he’s never charged.

Do these people want to come back even if it means going to prison?

Yes, overwhelmingly, and this is this is one of the elements of hypocrisy that we’re seeing among the Islamic State members. These are people who joined a terrorist group that was intent on destroying Western culture. And yet I think they all realize that being in a Canadian jail is going to be much more comfortable than them being in the Kurdish one.

Are they at all apologetic?

The ISIS narrator, Mohammed Khalifa, said: “I do not regret what I did, I stand by the Islamic State.” He made that very clear.

The two women that I interviewed on Sunday, including the one who was born in Hamilton, were very often apologetic. They said that they deeply regret it, they wish they’d never gone.

But I think it’s fair to call into question the authenticity of that mea culpa. These are people who waited until the very moment before the collapse of ISIS before escaping.

You seem to have reported on a disproportionate number of Canadians in ISIS.

I’m starting to feel like an honorary Canadian. A Canadian woman I interviewed for a story that hasn’t been published yet was sitting in the desert, still wearing the black burqa of the Islamic State, and she said to me: “The only thing I want right now is a cup of Tim Hortons.” Just to show how American I am, I didn’t know what that was and I had to ask her to explain Tim Hortons to me.

New France

In Quebec, they’re known to some as F.F.F.’s, French from France. While they’re not taking over the province, their growing numbers have become impossible to ignore in parts of Montreal. Dan Bilefsky, our correspondent in Montreal, wrote about the new arrivals and has shared some thoughts about the experience:

As a former Paris correspondent, I was especially struck by all the French people living in my Plateau-Mont-Royal neighborhood after I moved to Montreal about a year ago. So I set out to explore how Montrealers felt about the influx of newcomers, many of whom have come to escape economic malaise back home, to study or in search of adventure. I was also interested in learning about whether the French experienced culture shock in a place they had once colonized.

Among those I spoke to was Anièle Lecoq. Ms. Lecoq, a native of Grenoble, in southeast France, emigrated to Quebec in 1978, just two years after the nationalist Parti Québécois was elected for the first time. She recalled that during those heady days, there was a conscious effort in Quebec to distance itself from France in an attempt to affirm an independent and distinct identity.

These days, she said, Montreal was especially appreciated by French people because it offers a “model multicultural society where different ethnicities integrate well while retaining their own identities.”

“Here you will find wines from all over the world when you go to the wine shop,” she said. “In France you will find wines from France.”

[Read: Culture Shock for French in Quebec: ‘We Smoke Cigarettes, They Smoke Pot’]

[Lire en français: Le choc culturel des Français au Québec: «On fume des clopes, ils fument du pot!»]

Trans Canada

—Canada is under increasing pressure from Washington to ban China’s Huawei from its networks, while the company’s chief financial officer is facing an extradition hearing in Vancouver. In the midst of that political storm, Huawei said it’s hiring another 200 people in Canada.

—Ibrahim and Kawthar Barho left one of the worst parts of Syria and found refuge in Halifax. Now a house fire has killed all seven of their children.

—It was originally a stunt to recruit Roman Catholic priests. The clerics who recently revived the Flying Fathers hockey team hope that it will help restore their public image following widespread cases of abuse involving the church.

—Marc Martel, who is from Montreal, once fronted a Canadian band that performed Christian music. Today he’s Freddie Mercury’s vocal doppelgänger.

Around The Times

—Kikkan Randall and Jessie Diggins won the United States’ first Olympic gold medal in cross-country skiing last year. Randall didn’t know it at the time, but she had breast cancer. Christopher Clarey visited Randall at her home in Penticton, British Columbia, for a sensitive profile of her changed life.

—Efforts to restore a building that played a key role in one of the darkest moments in the United States’ civil rights history have been trapped in limbo. But this multimedia article about the tale at least restores the scene digitally.

—Offices can be an emotional challenge for many people. There are efforts underway to make sure that they aren’t a roadblock to employment for people on the autism spectrum. There’s at least one company, however, where people on the spectrum are the office norm.

A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the past 15 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.

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