It’s the threat heard ’round the world from Americans every time their presidential candidate loses an election: I’m moving to Canada.
This time around, after GOP hopeful Mitt Romney lost his quest to unseat President Barack Obama, the search term spiked on Google.
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According to Google analytics, the term “move to Canada” saw a 51 percent spike from the normal volume of searches for that term after Romney lost Tuesday night.
The obvious irony, however, is that the “move to Canada” threat is usually from disgruntled, liberal Democrats who fear the vision Republicans have for the country. For them, Canada is viewed as a safe haven, with its socialized medicine, liberal immigration stances and other progressive social policies, including French being one of two official languages.
The search spike is even more ironic when you account for the fact that disappointment with Obama’s health care plan was a major source of ire for Republicans this cycle, and Republican candidates derided the plan from the stump every chance they got as a “job-killing” piece of legislation.
Canadians, however, shouldn’t worry about an influx of angry Republicans moving to their country.
Back in 2004, when President George W. Bush defeated Democratic hopeful John Kerry, the term peaked on Google. But according to the New York Times, those that threaten to move to our neighbor to the north rarely follow through.
“Relatively few people make the difficult decision to uproot themselves and their families,” Janice Gross Stein, the director of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, told the New York Times. “The one big exception was the desire to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War.”
