American expat having the same nerd shortage in Manitoba, but worse. 1 out of 100 have heard of linux, and 7 out of ten of those will wince/sneer when it's mentioned. A handful of people use Solaris or AIX (because you don't get fired for buying IBM/ORCL), but most are windows peasants trying to keep their ASP.NET skills relevant.

It's like living in 1999 again.