And then he shares a story that shocked me, about what he calls the “lost boys.” A Nova Scotia mayor told him, “Thomas, we have a problem with Albertans,” because many Nova Scotians go to Alberta for work and then come back radicalized, or at least angry. Most of the people protesting a federal gun “buyback” program in Cape Breton worked on the rigs in Alberta, he said. (Thomas, 56, himself spent some of his childhood in Cape Breton after his family defected from communist Poland; they moved to Alberta seeking opportunity.)