Bermuda has a lot going for it as a place where professionals want to work and where corporations feel they can successfully base their businesses, but the Island's Government should be wary of taking it all for granted.

Mark Surrette, president of Nova Scotia-based recruitment agency Roberston Surrette warned Bermuda's authorities should not make life difficult for the country's financial lifeblood of international businesses.

Speaking at his office in Halifax he said: "Bermuda has got an awful lot going for it and it would be a shame to see them screw it up.

"It is a great place and it is so civilized and even within a two-hour flight, so access is easy.

"Whereas, the Cayman Islands is much further away and not as well developed and the people have a Caribbean mentality and Bermuda is an educated and well-paid society and a highly sustainable economy - it has got the lot really.

"But, that is the cry we have been hearing from businesses and individuals about the rules for ex-pats and I think the political controversy worries some businesses."

The links between Bermuda and Halifax, are stronger than ever before - if recruitment agency Roberston Surrette is anything to go by.

For the agency, which is based in downtown Halifax and works in recruitment, career transitions and consulting services, has been serving the Island's job market for the past two years and has already seen business boom in that short space of time, according to partner Ian Sullivan.

Robertson Surrette started life primarily as a recruitment agency in 1976 and today runs a recruiting business working on behalf of employers to help them fill positions they have a need for, a career transitions side assisting candidates get back in the market place following a redundancy or dismissal and consulting services based mainly on human resources to provide development, coaching and improving teamwork.

The agency, which has offices across the Atlantic Canada provinces with a 40-strong staff base, including 25 at their headquarters in Halifax alone, covers finance and accounting, sales and marketing and human resources throughout the country as well as abroad, to name but a few industries, specialising in the financial services sector in Bermuda.

"We have completed work for a number of companies in Bermuda," said Mr. Sullivan.

"We have done work for CITCO and Meridian Services and mostly I would spend my time in accounting and finance, vertically 75 percent of my time is spent there.

"We have started relationships with businesses in Bermuda and we have met pretty much everybody in the game and we have been working with them, helping them meet their needs."

To illustrate the point, Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Surrette visited Bermuda for four days at the end of June to find out about opportunities for Canadians in the country, meeting up with the Island's very own recruitment firm Bermuda Jobs and a number of other firms to test the water.

"Nova Scotia Business, who are an economic development agency, identified Bermuda as a target market, especially the insurance and area and they started to promote and work with Bermuda a number of years ago," said Mr. Surrette.

"The idea was all about meeting the challenge of bringing ex-pats into Bermuda and then there are the legacy connections between Nova Scotia and Bermuda and the fact that Halifax has professional corporates who are readily available.

"They introduced us to a number of firms as a potential supplier and we were quite surprised as we got more into it by the natural links between Bermuda and Nova Scotia."

On the flipside, numerous companies in Bermuda have, and indeed are, setting up back office operations in Halifax to cater for their accounting, administration, IT and help-desk needs, and at the same time generating a number of jobs for Canadians, while Robertson Surrette also helps with repatriation of Canadian nationals returning from working in Bermuda to find employment back home.

"There is even a lot of Canadians here that head off to Bermuda for six years and when they are ready to come back they talk to us about what opportunities there are in Halifax," said Mr. Sullivan.

"It is really a niche market and it is the likes of the Cayman Islands, New York and Dublin that are really looking to promote Nova Scotia as the place to do business in years to come.

"Bermuda's business practices are also quite similar to Canada and it is easy and a civilized place and Bermudians are great people to work with."

Addressing the worrying trend of outsourcing from Bermuda to places such Canada, Mr. Surrette reckons companies are doing it because it makes financial sense.

"I think the benefits are in the cost and ease of tax and doing business here," he said.

"I think that is fundamentally why they are doing that." Despite the increasingly hard task of trying to recruit from centres across the world with a stronger currency in the face of a weak dollar, the main attraction of Bermuda is the lifestyle it can offer, according to Mr. Surrette.

"It is a wonderful place to live and raise the family," he said.

"There is a lot of attraction to Bermuda for stuff such as lifestyle, the climate and the romance of it all." And he holds high hopes for the future of fostering and developing relationships with Bermuda's businesses and the growing number of Canadians joining the Island's job market.

"We are going to continue to nurture those relationships," he said.

"We even looked at putting an office in Bermuda and learnt what the obligations were, so that doesn't make sense, but, instead we will be down there once or twice a year just talking to clients and trying to do what we can with them."