There's been a spike in the number of Americans thinking about moving to Canada in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election as president — but how many of them will actually pack their bags and follow through?
At least one Montreal immigration lawyer says the first 36 hours after Trump's win became official saw a surge in calls and online requests from Americans asking some exploratory questions about how they can make the move north.
David Cohen, the senior immigration attorney at Campbell Cohen, says he's seen similar waves of post-election emotion after the elections of George W. Bush and Barack Obama — but never something like he's seen with Trump.
"We have people calling us in Spanish, which we rarely do, from the U.S., asking us if there's opportunities for them to come to Canada," Cohen tells CTV News. 'We assume that these may be undocumented workers who are worried about deportation. We're having calls from all over the U.S., from cities like Boston, which you would expect, and Talladega [Alabama], which you would never expect."
The federal government's Citizenship and Immigration web site crashed on Tuesday night, just as the election results started becoming clear — which apparently drove thousands of people to the firm's web site. Cohen says around 6,000 people filled out the pre-assessment form on the web site in the overnight hours from Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.
The high traffic on Campbell Cohen's forced it to go down, too, for about 15 minutes that night.
Cohen also noted something he'd never seen before — calls about the possibility for Americans to claim some sort of asylum in Canada.
"The first caller, I thought it was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because we had never had that request from anybody in the U.S.," he says. "But by the third caller, I began to think people are actually are feeling this, and I explained that, you know, asylum, you have to have a legitimate fear of persecution based on ethnicity and religious belief. In a nightmare situation, that may come to be, but it certainly isn't the case now."
Cohen says the calls to his office are already starting to tail off, and he adds he doesn't expect the emotional response to the election results to translate into very many Americans actually following up on those initial calls and web site visits.
"With the losing side, the knee-jerk reaction, the emotional impulse is 'this president doesn't speak for me, I want to find another place to live, Canada is the logical choice.'"