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The federal government tells us there are some 60 people who have returned to Canadian soil after waging jihad abroad.

There are reasons to believe the number may be higher than that. But, regardless, it’s a big number.

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So far we’ve been talking about this mostly in the abstract. It’s more a statistic than anything else. We have no names. No pictures. No personal stories.

Not until now. A man who claims to be a returning ISIS fighter walking about freely in Toronto appeared in a recent New York Times podcast to tell his tale.

“He made his way back to Canada without being arrested under its antiterrorism laws,” the paper reports.

These laws make it a crime to travel abroad to participate in terror activities. It ought to be grounds to have the former ISIS fighter rounded up, locked up and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But that hasn’t happened.