Her answer is frank and practiced.<\/p>\n
\u201cI left because I was disillusioned with the U.S., and I didn\u2019t want to be a part of that country. They\u2019re always killing people of colour,\u201d Martin tells Discourse reporter Dave Flawse in an interview.<\/p>\n
During the Vietnam War, educated and skilled American immigrants came to the Comox Valley and surrounding areas for similar reasons, often to preserve their lives. Today, the United States is seeing similar political upheaval, and those seeking a way out are also looking north.<\/p>\n
According to the\u00a0Medical Council of Canada<\/a>, Canada is now seeing a new, though smaller, flood of educated American immigrants. This time it\u2019s medical professionals.<\/p>\n A recent\u00a0announcement<\/a>\u00a0from the province says more than 500 health professionals trained in the U.S. have accepted job offers in B.C. as of February 2026, with 141 planning on coming to Vancouver Island. They have come as part of a\u00a0targeted campaign<\/a>\u00a0by the B.C. government \u2014 launched in March 2025 \u2014 to recruit trained health-care workers from south of the border.<\/p>\n \u201cMore doctors and health professionals from the United States are choosing B.C. because they can focus on patients in a strong public system that values their work,\u201d Premier David Eby said in a news release.<\/p>\n A war resister from 1969, and subject in Martin\u2019s book named Valerie Straw, put her reasons for coming to Vancouver Island another way:\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe had a feeling of being rats leaving a sinking ship.\u201d<\/p>\n The\u00a0history\u00a0of war resister immigration<\/p>\n Many factors led to Valerie and her partner, Greg, moving to Malcolm Island, B.C.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe escalation of the Vietnam War,\u00a0the pressure from the draft board<\/a>, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency. The list was endless,\u201d Martin writes in\u00a0War Resisters.<\/p>\n The term war resister replaces \u201cthe shame-laden labels \u2018draft dodgers\u2019 and \u2018deserters,\u2019\u201d Martin writes, referring to the estimated \u201c100,000 U.S. citizens [who] fled their country seeking a peaceful life in Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere are so many war resisters [in the Comox Valley] it will blow your mind,\u201d Martin tells The Discourse. Martin, who is relatively new to the community, knows at least 50 resisters and notes that they assimilated into society. \u201cEven among ourselves we did not know who came.\u201d<\/p>\n She only discovered these 50 or so people for herself while researching the book. Even the birthplace of a friend whom she\u2019d known for decades went unmarked.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI had no idea he was a war resister,\u201d Martin says.<\/p>\n To legally immigrate to Canada, war resisters had to meet a point system. Most resisters had skills or were university educated, making it easy for them to meet the point system requirements, Martin writes.<\/p>\n When a pardon became available in the U.S. in 1977, many war resisters left Canada to go home. But a 1986 census showed that half stayed, \u201cmaking it the largest and best-educated group this country has ever received,\u201d Martin writes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Another kind of resistance<\/p>\n Sarah, an American family doctor and obstetrician, had always talked with her partner about working outside of the United States one day.<\/p>\n \u201cThen, after the shift in political tone over the last few years and the re-election of Trump, we said maybe now is the time to go,\u201d Sarah says.<\/p>\n The Discourse is keeping her identity anonymous because she must still maintain a medical licence in the United States for two years to be licensed in Canada and doesn\u2019t want to jeopardize her job.<\/p>\n In early 2025, she saw advertisements on LinkedIn and other online platforms targeting American health-care workers to work in Canada. The couple had previously travelled to Vancouver Island.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe love Victoria,\u201d Sarah explains to The Discourse.<\/p>\n In June 2025, Sarah toured practices across Vancouver Island, eventually finding one with like-minded people in the Comox Valley. She spoke with her partner and they decided to \u201cpull the trigger\u201d and move to the Island.<\/p>\n Since moving here in October 2025, Sarah has been taking advantage of supports from the\u00a0Division of Family Practices<\/a>, including continuing medical education and monthly meetings for new physicians to the area, she says.<\/p>\n Sarah is in contact with two American friends in the medical field who also plan to make the move to Canada. One is a pediatrician working in a small, remote town.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere are a bunch of funding cuts to rural access hospitals. Her position may not even exist,\u201d Sarah says.<\/p>\n She notes that Canadian health care differs from the one she left back home where \u201cthere are no federal guidelines for vaccines at this point. As a physician, I recommended people follow the old vaccine schedule that got them covered for things like measles,\u201d Sarah says.<\/p>\n The new federal government mandates in the U.S. played a part in why she made the move to Canada, and the Vietnam War resisters similarly had fundamental moral and practical objections to their government\u2019s policies back home.<\/p>\n \u2018Health care infusion\u2019<\/p>\n A grassroots effort to attract doctors to Canada began by chance in 2025 when Tod Maffin\u00a0famously invited Americans to spend time in Nanaimo<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Maffin was surprised when \u201ca lot of health-care workers came as a way to, you know, kick the tires on Canada,\u201d Maffin tells Discourse reporter Dave Flawse.<\/p>\n That\u2019s when Maffin decided to begin the\u00a0Healthcare Infusion<\/a>, which, according to the initiative\u2019s website, is \u201ca volunteer-driven national movement connecting doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals with the Canadian communities that need them most.\u201d<\/p>\n The movement has since spread.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere are now more than 40 chapters in 40 communities around the country in almost every province and territory that are running one of these things,\u201d Maffin says.<\/p>\n Maffin explains that websites from federal and provincial levels of government all provide adequate information to prospective immigrants, \u201cbut none of them really talk about how it all connects together.\u201d<\/p>\n With the Healthcare Infusion, Maffin says he wanted to \u201cadd a sort of community piece to the puzzle as well,\u201d where people can ask Canadians any questions they might have about life in the country.<\/p>\n A grassroots system also existed in the 1960s and 70s to bring in Americans and to aid their transition into Canadian society.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2018So you are having a war resister\u2019<\/p>\n A popular underground book,\u00a0Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada<\/a>,\u00a0was published in Toronto andsold 100,000 copies in America. The manual \u201cplayed a vital role in resisters entering Canada,\u201d Martin writes in\u00a0War Resisters.<\/p>\n Once immigrants arrived, \u201caround 75 different organizations aided Vietnam War resisters to enter and settle [in] Canada,\u201d Martin writes.<\/p>\n In B.C., the Vancouver Committee to Aid American War Objectors was one group established in the late 1960s to meet \u201cthe heavy demand from war resisters entering the province,\u201d Martin writes. The committee provided referrals for housing, employment, healthcare and networking while publishing pamphlets to aid recent immigrants.<\/p>\n Another organization published a similar pamphlet for Canadian host families offering temporary housing to immigrants. It was called\u00a0So You Are Having a War Resister. Martin writes that some resisters stayed with families for weeks or months without cost.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2018To preserve social\u00a0history\u2019<\/p>\n In 1972, when Martin graduated from university, she travelled from Illinois to live with friends on Haida Gwaii, planning to stay for 12 months. \u201cI learned how to skin and butcher deer, clean and fillet fish, chop wood and kill a chicken,\u201d she writes in the story collection\u00a0Gumboot Girls: Adventure, Love & Survival on the North Coast of British Columbia.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cMy year on Haida Gwaii turned into 35,\u201d Martin writes. Eventually, she moved to the Comox Valley.<\/p>\n When asked why she wrote these stories about war resisters, Martin explains that when she began, the 50-year anniversary of the Vietnam war was coming up, \u201cand 50 years gives you the long view. I wanted to capture the stories to preserve social\u00a0history.\u201d<\/p>\n A\u00a0history\u00a0that\u2019s proving more important than ever.<\/p>\n When asked to comment on the parallels of American immigration between then and now, Sarah notes that, \u201cHistory\u00a0doesn\u2019t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWhy did you leave the United States?\u201d Joline Martin, the Courtenay-based author of\u00a0War Resisters: Standing Against the Vietnam…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":626792,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":["post-626791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626791\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/b34f45421fadeb2fdad754e655330a26bc38c01fe9b3bc3ee0df8ca8c2ef3421.jpg\")
Valerie and Greg Straw giving their baby a bath in the makeshift shed where they were living on Canada\u2019s west coast in Mitchell Bay in the 1970s. Photo courtesy of Joline Martin<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/dafdb4eb174621bb1026d4ab2acf2254efd1a3980013d8cb449a8a643bcd529f.jpg\")
The North Island Hospital in the Comox Valley. As of February 2026, 141 medical professionals were planning to come to Vancouver Island. Photo by Dave Flawse\/The Discourse<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/01d4ba25bd0eb867d2980d4d7bb93e395958a3869e09a22cc9f57148336d3a71.jpg\")
Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada was an instrumental book for Vietnam War resisters looking to immigrate to Canada. Cover courtesy of House of Anansi Press<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/db0b019aa8367b2559f00d36148bc9d38dd4086cd5212910f98a32be18e59603.jpg\")
Joline Martin (right) with friends on Haida Gwaii, 1978. Photo courtesy of Joline Martin<\/p>\n