The British Equivalent of Threatening to Move to Canada?

Shortly after the U.S. Super Tuesday primary elections, Google Search Trends revealed a surge in Americans searching for information on how to move to Canada. In the wake of the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union, we wondered: is there a British version of thinking about moving to Canada? So we asked Simon Rogers, data editor for Google News Lab, to look up exactly which destinations residents of different U.K. cities have been exploring so far today. This is what he found:

As it turns out, for many Brits, the British equivalent to moving to Canada is in fact ... moving to Canada. For people in London and Cardiff, the U.S.’s northern neighbor was the most popular “move to” search choice, while it was the second most popular among web searchers in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Southampton. In Scotland’s biggest cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh, the popular choice is more eccentric. There, most people have been searching “move to Gibraltar.” It seems unlikely that these major cities are genuinely thinking about squeezing onto a tiny rock, but Gibraltar has been on people’s minds, I suspect, because it was first to declare a referendum result (for Remain) early this morning and is now finding itself under high-profile pressure for power-sharing from Spain.