Accents

I work with quite a few British guys. Today, two of them confirmed something I've suspected for a while. We got to talking about how much the local accents vary across the UK, and I asked about Canadian accents. According to the two guys I was speaking to, Canadian (and Northern US and Australian) accents are often easier to understand for the British than the accents of other Britons! The accents simply vary so much as you head North in the UK that foreign English accents are more universally understood. I contrast this with the fact that a person from Vancouver sounds (to me at least) identical to someone from Ontario. Newfoundland is another story...