In the 1960s and ‘70s, dur­ing the Vietnam War, some­where between 30,000 and 40,000 Americans came to Canada to escape the draft — and many of them stayed. The New York Times recently pro­filed one of these expats.

Michael Wolfson arrived in Canada in 1968, after his appli­ca­tion for con­sci­en­tious objec­tor sta­tus was rejected. According to the Times, he wrote to the draft board, say­ing, “The rea­son I did not com­ply with your order [to report for mil­i­tary ser­vice] is that I did not, on that par­tic­u­lar day, feel like it.…”

Eventually, though, Wolfson set­tled down and grew up. He earned a bach­e­lor of sci­ence degree from the University of Toronto and went on to receive a Ph.D. in eco­nom­ics from Cambridge University in the U.K. Today, he has dual U.S.-Canadian cit­i­zen­ship and works as a senior sta­tis­ti­cian for Statistics Canada.

You can read the rest of the Times arti­cle here. To learn more about what hap­pened to many of the Vietnam-​​era draft resisters in Canada, have a look at the book, Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada, by soci­ol­o­gist John Hagan.

Photo by WalkingGeek (flickr)