Mr. Cooper, you raise an important point. Local knowledge of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton is really important to understanding the point you are articulating. The commission acknowledged that the preponderance of submissions during the consultation were opposed to the attachment of Antigonish to Cape Breton.
In fact I agree with you—there's no perfect riding. It's not perfect now. Antigonish community residents actually want the entirety of Antigonish County to come back into the mainland of Nova Scotia.
The challenge I have with the conflicting evidence you've pointed to is that the commission asserted that they had heard some submissions indicating commonalities between Antigonish and the strait region and Cape Breton. They're not proposing to annex Antigonish only to the strait region. They're proposing to annex Antigonish to the entirety of Cape Breton Island except for Sydney and Glace Bay—if you don't know the map, that's sort of the upper right-hand corner if you can picture it on a map—despite some commonalities that are actually very real. If there was a proposal to attach Pictou County, Antigonish and Port Hawkesbury, I could see a reasonable person saying that maybe that would make sense. Nobody is talking about that, and the population presumably wouldn't think it would work. Otherwise, they might have come up with that kind of a solution.
What they're proposing now is to attach Antigonish not just to the strait region but to all of Cape Breton, except Sydney and Glace Bay, including communities that do not have those commonalities.