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Originally Posted by someone123
On the one hand there is cultural distinctiveness and on the other hand there is exceptionalism. It's hard to separate the two and the exceptionalist interpretation is more flattering so there tends to be a bias in that direction.
Atlantic Canada is one place where there's a lot more similarity and de facto integration than a lot of people let on. Yes, Cape Breton is a special snowflake. So are many other parts of the region where people have different accents and so on (Acadians even speak a different language, and they did not come from Quebec, the Mi'kmaq are another group, and so are African NSians). And the big bad city is probably 10% Cape Bretoners, so there are de facto cultural and economic ties. This partly explains why there are "Atlantic" sounding accents.
If you take a random sampling in Halifax you'll get a cross-section of people from all around the region. I tend to visit a handful of people when I go back. The group is a roughly even sampling of people from NF, NB, and PEI. Most of the locals have relatives around the region. The scenario where everybody in your family goes back generations locally is an exception rather than the rule. This isn't really compatible with the view of Atlantic Canada as a bunch of tenuously-connected solitudes.
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Oh, definitely - regarding Halifax being a mix of everyone (and I don't say that as some sideways way of taking away from what Halifax is - just acknowledging it's the go-to city in Atlantic City for migrants who aren't willing to go west).
My mother's family is mostly here, but my father's family is actually MOSTLY in Nova Scotia today, I think. Lower Sackville/Bedford/etc. They both have 13 siblings and I can't remember them all, let alone where they live. But my father has, for sure... 6 siblings, plus their spouses, and children in NS.
I suspect Cape Breton's militant differentism is a result of the high Newfoundland-heritage population. We would have brought that mindset there with us, even as we interbred with the locals and the awareness of Newfoundland heritage waned.
Before we joined Canada, we were counted as foreign-born in the Canadian census. So that actually shows us how many Newfoundlanders were in a given place. The stats for Cape Breton are a HUGE percentage of the population. And keep in mind this only includes Newfoundland born - not their children born in Canada. And this was part of the 50-year period when we had several times more kids, on average, than Canadians (my grandfather had 21 siblings, for example):
As an aside, Boston alone accounted for more Newfoundland-born residents at that time than all of mainland Canada.