As the Afro-Americans who came to work as railroad porters in Canada were all men, about 40 per cent of the Black men living in Montreal in the 1920s were married to white women. This statistic excluded those in common-law relationships, which were also common, and which estranged the Black community of Montreal from the conservative and deeply Christian rural Black communities in Ontario and Nova Scotia, who were offended by the prevalence of casual sex and common-law relationships in the Black community in Montreal. The Afro-American community in Montreal was seen, perhaps not entirely fairly, as a centre of debauchery and licentiousness by the other Black communities in Canada, who made a point of insisting that Montreal was not all representative of their communities. The West Indian communities in the Maritime provinces, with the largest number working in the Cape Breton steel mills and in the Halifax shipyards always referred pejoratively to the older Black community in Nova Scotia as the "Canadians" and the Black communities in Quebec and Ontario as the "Americans". The West Indian communities in Nova Scotia in the 1920s were Anglican, fond of playing cricket, and unlike the other Black communities in Canada were often involved in Back-to-Africa movements.