The ads were launched months before Donald Trump was elected president and they got straight to the point. “Thinking of moving to Canada?” read one, set to a backdrop of the Republican candidate at a rally. Another made by a startup in southern Ontario featured Trump flashing a thumbs up.

The brazen recruitment campaign was among the first to capture the streak of opportunism now rippling through Canada’s tech sector.

For decades the sector has watched as much of its talent headed south, lured by better pay and big names. Those who chose to stay behind, meanwhile, were left fretting about a looming shortage of skilled workers. Then came Trump.

“Crazy day,” Ryan Holmes, the founder of Hootsuite, a social media management platform based in Vancouver, noted on Twitter the day after the US election. He had already heard from five potential candidates based in the US as well the founder of a 60-person company looking to relocate north of the border. “Is this the reversal of the talent diaspora that Canada has historically seen and [the] beginning of the US brain drain?” he asked.

Across Canada, cities and tech organisations aren’t waiting to find out. They’ve launched a series of assertive recruiting campaigns aimed at capitalizing on the wildly divergent signals emanating from either side of the border when it comes to immigration.

“Canada’s looking pretty good right now,” said Michael Tippett, a Vancouver-based co-founder of True North, a startup launched in January to help tech companies interested in creating subsidiaries north of the border. Trump’s first few months in power saw two attempts to impose a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries as well as an executive order targeting the use of H-1B visas, often used by the tech industry to bring foreign workers to the US.

These actions have rattled the tech sector, said Tippett. “If you consider the fact that 43% of Silicon Valley founders are not US-born, you start to realise just how big a deal this could be.”

So far, hundreds of companies have expressed interest in True North’s pitch of Canada as a stable alternative to the turbulence of the Trump administration. “Companies have, I think, lost a bit of confidence in the stability and predictability of the US immigration system and are looking to Canada as a place where they can set up shop and not be subject to those whims as much.”

The opportunity comes at a unique time for Canada’s tech industry, said Heather Galt who helms Go North Canada, a partnership between the country’s tech organisations aimed at bringing Canadian expats home. “Canadian tech is hotter and more exciting than it’s ever been right now.”

Homegrown heavyweights such as Shopify, Kik and Hootsuite have helped propel the sector into one of Canada’s fastest growing, with more than 200,000 jobs expected to be created across the country between now and 2020. Montreal is already recognised as a hub for deep learning while Toronto’s newly announced Vector Institute aims to turn the city into a global nucleus in artificial intelligence. Ontario’s University of Waterloo was recently ranked among the world’s top ten when it comes to alumni who have created billion-dollar startups.

Go North Canada’s events in San Francisco and Seattle have regularly attracted hundreds of expats, as well as Americans and foreign nationals working in the US. “As a Canadian culture, we’ve always welcomed diversity, always encouraged entrepreneurship, we’ve also had an interest and orientation towards science,” said Galt. “And all of those things continue to be important Canadian values in contrast to other parts of the world right now.”

It’s a message many seem eager to embrace. In February, Invest Ottawa, a non-profit organisation primarily funded by the city’s municipal government, launched a recruitment campaign in five US regions, highlighting the thousands of jobs expected to be created by Ottawa’s tech sector in the coming years.

Interest has been “off the charts”, said Ryan Gibson of Invest Ottawa. More than 3 million people have so far engaged with the ads. “It’s pretty astonishing what we see coming from the United States. We knew there would be some excitement, but I didn’t know there would be this much excitement.”

Hundreds have signed up to be notified about jobs available in Canada’s capital city. “So those are 1,200 qualified candidates potentially looking for placements in Ottawa,” he said. “And the growth rate of the list is about 4,000%, week to week.”

The organisation – which is now looking at expanding the campaign to India and the UK – is hoping to start seeing recruits arrive in Ottawa in the coming months.

Those at True North are also expecting companies to begin setting up shop across Canada in the near future. As soon as they do, the country will begin to benefit, said Tippett. “These are jobs, these are companies, these are subsidiaries, these are funded organisations that are coming up here and bringing their funding with them in many cases.”

And that’s just the short term impact, he said. “I mean we’re going to see the Canadian economy become a much more innovative, dynamic, global leader in technology,” he said. “I think this is going to really give a pretty substantial boost to the Canadian technology scene.”