On Wednesday afternoon, following the ascendance of a sentient, smushed-up cheese puff to the most powerful office in the world, so many people visited Canada’s informational immigration website that it crashed. Now, officials have confirmed what some already suspected: A large number of those people were desperate Americans presumably plotting their escape.
The CBC reports that a whopping 200,000 people were on the website on election night. Of those stricken souls, 100,000 were visiting from the United States. The total figure dwarfs the 17,000 who were on the site at the same time a week prior.
Given that election night marked the beginning of a new and utterly horrifying US national nightmare, the knee-jerk “flight” response is perhaps unsurprising. (Hell, I have an Australian passport, and I dug it up to make sure it wasn’t set to expire any time soon.) President-elect Trump has promised to deport millions of people, suggested he would create mandatory registration for Muslim Americans, threatened to sweep away the rights of American women and announced a 100-day plan so mind-numbingly repugnant it borders on satire.
Of course, it’s worth noting that those 100,000 Americans were merely curious about the idea of running away to Canada, and most probably won’t actually go through with it. Still, for those Americans who decide to actually flee north, here’s a good primer.
[CBC]