Quebec could be in line to become considerably richer if estimates of an oil deposit prove true. The claim was made two years ago concerning oil riches reaching up to massive 300 million barrels of sweet crude in and around Anticosti Island, an almost-uninhabited government-owned island off the Gulf of St. Lawrence.Premier Pauline Marois recently gave a speech in which she gleefully attempted to mobilize this news into support for separation, as she pointed out ruefully that under the current Canadian structure, a share of the future oil windfall would have to be redistributed to poorer provinces. She omits the fact, of course, that Quebec currently receives something in the area of $7 billion per year from the Alberta oil fields.
Whether or not the 200-300 million barrels of oil said to lie around the island are indeed really there is another question, but previous attempts to make the island profitable have always ended in fiasco perhaps best symbolized by the shipwrecks that the island is known for.The companies that have suggested the possibility of great oil wealth from the island are Corridor (CDH - currently trading at .73 cents in a 52-week range of 48 to 87 cents) and Petrolia (PEA - currently trading in the 60 cent range after being up to about $1.50 last year at this time).
Repeated attempts through the ages to turn the island into a forestry resource have failed and the province has loaded it up with deer - which now number a staggering 160,000 - and yet no wolves or bears or other predators prowl around to limit their population.
So anybody who pays for one of the government's pricey hunting trips to the island will have an easy time gunning down the gentle beasts, which are known to walk right up to tourists when not stripping every bush dry of its fruit and eating every new sapling dead.
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| That's your Anticosti Island right there |
French industrialist Henri Menier bought the island in 1895 and established a bunch of crazy rules, residents were not allowed to wear white or own dogs, but he gave up on his attempt at building a feudal settlement. He sold it to Consolidated Bathurst in 1926. Their longstanding attempts to exploit the lumber proved too costly and they solid it to Quebec in 1974 for around $25 million.
Quebec immediately tried to make it into a hunting and fishing tourist destination but it was a money-loser, gobbling up $5 million a year from the start, so they handed it over to five outfitters to manage.
One of the older claims had it that the island had no mosquitoes or flies.
The first thing I would do to the place would be to drop a few wolves into the forests and a few bears while you're at it.
Also, according to the rules of the inevitable, there will be several highly-unanticipated black swan events occurring around within the next few decades, which I predict will include one that requires a mass exodus from a country or two.
These environmental refugees could use a place like this to settle and I would say that we could fit something like 2 million people on Anticosti.