Canada Nearly Snagged Lease Of Tropical Island

MONTREAL -- The last minister of tourism under former premier René Levésque cut a deal with the government of the Bahamas in 1985, giving Quebec a 99-year-lease on a tropical island -- but the cabinet nixed the deal, the minister's son said yesterday.

"What people don't know is that my father had discreetly negotiated with the prime minister of Bahamas, for the price of $1, a 99-year-lease on the sole condition of hiring local labour," said Jean-Marc Leger, president of Leger Marketing.

The island, said Leger, was Eleuthera, 80 kilometres east of Nassau. Measuring 180 kilometres long and as narrow as one kilometre wide in some places, it has a population of 8,000.

Leger made the revelation yesterday in his weekly column in the Journal de Montréal. The news was buried near the end of the column, which was about how much Quebecers hate winter. The column featured new polling data showing one in six Quebecers took a vacation in a sunny destination this past winter.

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