Cape Breton is probably one of my very favourite places in Canada. It is stunning and you can watch pilot whales off the northern tip. The mountains are gorgeous and will burn out your brakes and your transmission if you don't have a heavy duty vehicle, but I was happy to trade my chevette's tranny for a visit.
It's been a while since I was there, but if not much has changed, you have to be fully self-sustaining to live there, and they had a very high suicide rate amongst first nations youth there. I hope that has changed!!!
We moved to the opposite side of the country, but if we were ready at the time we began moving west to be self-sustaining, we probably would have settled in Nova Scotia were it not for the few issues that I'll mention here. It truly is gorgeous and the people are really relaxed and just awesome in general.
We're now in a very relaxed and liberal place and one major difference here is that it is recession-proof and there are always more jobs to fill than people to fill them, so pay is very high relative to the rest of the country. N.S. has a lot of trouble during recessions; it takes a very long time for them to pull out and that goes for pretty much everywhere along the east coast.
It is all so gorgeous out there though.
Also, for anyone interested, N.S. has some environmental issues that I definitely wanted to avoid when we were deciding where to move 4 yrs ago. Their pesticide spraying laws are getting better, but the land there is pretty well poisoned by years of farming with heavy chemicals and then the manufacturing district's lax dumping of wastes hasn't helped either. I'd google this sort of thing about N.S. if I were considering settling there.
Soooo pretty though.
