I would think that Canada will turn them over once they've been officially charged. I don't know that they have been charged as yet. As for turning over a US citizen to a 3rd country, I think that is a separate issue from that of returning a national to his country of origin, and it just confuses the issue.
You may be right, an indictment may be sufficiant. I'm not a lawyer so I'm not sure. At any rate in spite of existing indictment once they've filed refuge claims; those claims must be heard, adjudicated and of course appealed, so it's not a simple matter of handing them over to a legal jurisdiction.
I think that is what the debate is about over this; once a refuge claim is made in Canada you're locked into a process that may take years depending on the case. As some Immigration Officials have already said, the two soldiers do not have a strong case so this is unlikely to drag on.
As for turning a US citizen over to a 3rd country; I mentioned that only because the US government did just that last year to a Canadian citizen of Iranian descent. They arrested him in New York and deported him, to Syria of all places, where he was tortured. It was later determined that he was arrested as a result of information provided by Canadian authorities.
The guy has been returned to Canada but there's still an argument going on about the truth of the information that sent him there and of course, why Syria?
So when I bring up the example of third country involvemnt I mean to highlight the danger that, in the absence of due process, innocent people could find themselves on a plane to Syria or "disappeared" entirely, just on the say so of some bureaucratic nudge in the CSIS, who has a James Bond complex.
Thanks for the response Tallguy