On Canadian island, some see chance to escape Trump
CAPE BRETON ISLAND, Canada — The first sign of what Rob Calabrese would come to think of as America’s unmooring began last year, just after Donald Trump won his first presidential primary and Calabrese published a $28 website that he’d designed in 30 minutes. “Hi Americans!” it began, and what followed was a sales pitch for an island where Muslims could “roam freely,” and where the only walls were those “holding up the roofs” of “extremely affordable houses.”
“Let’s get the word out!” Calabrese wrote, adding a photo of an empty coastline along the Atlantic Ocean. “Move to Cape Breton if Donald Trump Wins!”
It was meant as a joke — but seven hours after Calabrese linked the site to the Facebook page of the pop radio station where he works as a DJ, in came an email from America. “Not sure if this is real but I’ll bite.” And then another: “It pains me to think of leaving, but this country is beyond repair.”
And then more. Within 24 hours, there were 80 messages. Within a week, there were 2,000, and many used the same words: “nervous” and “terrified” and “help.”
“The United States is losing its mind,” one person wrote.
“So ashamed of half of my country I could curl up and cry,” wrote another.
The emails kept coming, so many that soon the island’s tourism association brought on four seasonal workers to help respond to the inquiries.
“Look at this one,” Calabrese said one day recently, scrolling through a spreadsheet where the inquiries were organized and stopping on No. 2,121. “I am a former U.S. Marine who did two tours to Iraq. And I want out of here.”
“Beyond astonished,” Calabrese said, scrolling through more.
“I desperately want to move my daughters to the safety and sanity of Canada,” email No. 3,248 read. “It doesn’t even really matter if Donald Trump wins. He has exposed the awful attitude that plagues the US.”
It was somewhere around email 4,230 that Trump was elected president of the United States, and just before his inauguration came email No. 4,635.
“Looking to immigrate to Cape Breton area from Colorado,” it began. “I am a skilled paralegal and my wife is an attorney.”
Calabrese read it, wondered briefly about the people who sent it, and waited for the next one to come in.
“What do people see on the horizon to be this afraid?” he said.
The email was written by Jimmy Gantenbein and Cathleen McEwen from their living room in Loveland, a town 50 miles north of Denver. A month later, furniture from that living room had been stuffed into the garage. Paint buckets lined the hallway. They’d been in touch with a real estate agent. Soon they planned to have their home on the market.
“Can you hand me a nail?” Cathleen, 61, asked as she fixed up the bedroom. “Here you go, Cat,” Jimmy, 54, said. They’d bought this home at the start of their marriage, and 17 years later they knew the place nearly as well as they knew each other. They had a view of the Rocky Mountains from the bedroom. Afternoon sunlight warmed the carpet where their old poodle liked to curl up. Two right turns and a left took them to the local Safeway.
And then came the arrival into their world of Donald Trump. He was on TV so often that Jimmy and Cathleen created a no-Trump rule after 9 p.m. He was in their town, holding a rally 10 miles from their home that drew an overflow crowd. He was in their neighborhood, his name popping up on yard signs all around them. During primary season, it felt as if he’d arrived at their own front yard, when their neighbor saw them in the driveway, walked over, and said he was supporting Trump. “We’re going with Bernie,” Jimmy and Cathleen recalled saying, and though the conversation was brief and cordial, they hadn’t talked to their neighbor since.
“We feel out of sync with everybody,” Cathleen was saying now.
And so, they were thinking of leaving. It’s not that they had never thought of moving, but Trump is what pushed them. To where, though?
Maybe Cape Breton, and maybe the house real estate agent Valarie Sampson was looking at now. Right on the ocean. One hundred forty-four acres of land. $220,000 Canadian, or $164,000 U.S.
“It’s a beautiful home if you’re looking to escape,” said Sampson, climbing into her SUV and steering through the island. Once rich in coal, Cape Breton’s mining had dried up, and nothing had replaced it yet. Every year, another 1,000 people were either dying or taking off for larger cities such as Toronto or Halifax. Budgets were shrinking. Ten schools had closed in the last year. The island’s unemployment rate was 15.5 percent. The population was down to 130,000, and that left Cape Breton with hundreds of empty homes.
Sampson knows that summers here feel different. The tourists arrive, the restaurants reopen and the lakes fill with sailboats. But for four or five months of the year, this is a place with short days, frigid temperatures and icy sidewalks.
As Sampson returned to the office, the only activity in Sydney, the island’s largest town, seemed to be a meeting of community leaders who were talking about how to save the island.
People passed around a research paper that said the island needed to attract 2,000 people annually to remain viable.
“We’re receiving thousands of emails,” one person said at the meeting. But that wasn’t the same as thousands of people moving there. Canada had strict immigration laws. People couldn’t just come because they wanted to. Applicants were scored based on age, skills and their ability to help the economy. Anybody who emailed Cape Breton was told they had to apply through Canada’s immigration agency. They were sent a link to begin a process that could take more than a year.
So maybe some Americans would arrive someday, but they hadn’t yet. As the responses rolled in, Calabrese had revised the site’s text to make it less political — and less directed at Americans.
“We need to be thinking about this,” one lawyer said. “What kind of person would come here?”
One answer to that question could be found just past the meeting hall, in a house that had been stripped of wire and abandoned for a year and now had a family of seven refugees from Syria. Fifty-four refugees had come to the island so far, and Ahmad Hamadi, 35, and his family were among the most recent. After escaping Syria and spending several years in Lebanon, they had ended up here because of the sponsorship of a church group on an island they’d never heard of.
Before the war, in a town outside of Damascus, Ahmad had owned a small department store. He’d lived on the same street with his parents and three siblings. He met friends for late-night shawarma and chicken at restaurants. He had fled four years ago, and now his family was scattered across three continents.
“One day I had a car, a house, a business, a life,” Ahmad said. “The second day I lost it all.”