The American election is over. Donald Trump won. That crashed the Citizenship and Immigration website for the federal government. Problems on the site began on election night when it became apparent that Trump was taking the lead over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
As the Toronto Star reported, CIC’s site crashing was big news around the world. Starting at 9 p.m on November 8th., Google Trends in the U.S. saw a surge in the topic of Canada and the election, amid CNN projections that Republican nominee Donald Trump would take key swing states including Florida. Lisa Filipps, a spokeswoman for Citizenship and Immigration Canada, was quoted as saying that the department’s site had failed “as a result of a significant increase in the volume of traffic,” but gave no details about the source of the traffic.
Prior to election night, the Canadian government reaffirmed its support for immigrants, in what’s largely been seen as a rebuke to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, on its official Twitter account. Canada had recently announced plans to take in 300,000 skilled immigrants and refugees; the biggest official pledge in a century.
All of this said, the reality is that there probably won’t be a bump in people leaving the U.S. for Canada. Zoocasa published a highly informative graph the day after the election. Check it out, here.