They’re filling a border refugee processing center to capacity on the weekends, but these weary travelers entering Canada from the U.S. aren’t seeking asylum – they’re cross-border shoppers lured south by the loonie’s record-breaking showing against the Yankee greenback.

Bargain-hungry shoppers – often arriving by the busload – have been choking key border crossings across the country on weekends, straining resources at the border and forcing officials to scramble to find staff and facilities to process their purchases.

In Ontario, a building intended to handle refugee claimants has been pressed into service to deal with the volume of shoppers. All across Canada, the story is much the same as Canadians cash in on a dollar that has been worth more than its U.S. counterpart for weeks.

Residents of St. Stephen, New Brunswick, endured a lineup of vehicles snaking through their small town bordering on Maine during the Remembrance Day weekend. At the same time, the wait at the Pacific Highway border crossing in Surrey, British Columbia, was about four hours long.

In Ontario, the crush of cross-border shoppers has led to extraordinary measures.

Last Sunday, some 50 chartered shopping buses carrying up to 55 people each began arriving after 4 p.m. at the Fort Erie crossing from Buffalo. With no personal exemptions on same-day travel purchases, hundreds of shoppers had to be processed for tax and possible duty payments.

“We had to park the buses in our commercial area so that we could orderly process them, [and] we did open up extra facilities,” said Jean D’Amelio-Swyer, a spokeswoman for Canada Border Services Agency.

“We opened up a refugee processing center and we had some extra cashier capability.”

Problem is, you can put only so many people in those buildings at the same time, said D’Amelio-Swyer. As a result, after waiting an hour to cross the border, same-day shoppers then faced a two- to three-hour wait for customs agents to process their goods.