Quebec provincial police have confirmed that a barrel discovered on an uninhabited island in the St-Lawrence River does not contain active anthrax — ruling out the most dangerous possibility in an ongoing mystery.
On Oct. 27, police responded to a call and descended on Île aux Canards, roughly 50 kilometres northeast of Quebec City, to recover the barrel.
A bomb squad, hazmat team, and helicopter were dispatched to handle the barrel with caution, and test samples from the container were sent to a military base in Suffield, Alta., for analysis.
“Because of the year of this barrel, because of the story, we could not take any chance before having the results back,” said Sûreté du Québec (SQ) spokesperson Audrey-Anne Bilodeau.
She’s referring to the inscription on the greyish-green metallic barrel that reads “Property Air Force U.S Army.” Its label indicates that it dates back to 1942.
The inscription on the barrel dates it back to 1942. (Matthew Joycey/Radio-Canada)
In a news release Wednesday, the SQ said the analyses determined the barrel contains a liquid “that does not pose a threat to public safety,” but police did not confirm what the liquid was or where the container came from.
So — how did this barrel spur talk of anthrax spores, the Second World War and a top secret project?
The answer: A months-long Radio-Canada investigation into its origins.
Christine and Sébastien LeBlanc discovered the barrel about two years ago on their private island in the Isle-aux-Grues archipelago, near Montmagny. They didn’t think much of it originally — until a book called Project N was published in March.
It’s the work of investigative journalists Vincent Frigon and Yves Bernard. They revealed that, on a neighbouring island called Grosse Île, there used to exist a top secret lab where the Canadian military built bombs filled with anthrax spores.
Vincent Frigon, left, and Yves Bernard are the investigative journalists who wrote about Project N. (Matthew Joycey/Radio-Canada)
Anthrax spores are a form of bacteria that are deadly when inhaled. Frigon and Bernard found that the Allied Forces wanted to produce a half million bombs with the bacteria to kill the populations of six German towns.
“During the Second World War, there were three closely kept secrets,” said Bernard. “The first: the atomic bomb. The second: the Enigma code — decrypting the German code used by submarines. And finally: Project N.”
They recounted how the production of anthrax spores began in 1943 in a lab on Grosse Île, and carried on until 1944.
By the end of the war, no bombs had been manufactured. But the journalists were able to track down Thomas Stovell, a former member of the military who was responsible for cleaning up the lab where the anthrax was produced.
Thomas Stovell, a former military member who worked in the anthrax facility on Grosse Île, supplied Frigon and Bernard with a picture of the lab from 1942. (Courtesy of Thomas Stovell/Canadian War Museum)
Stovell told Bernard and Frigon that his colleagues “took [the anthrax] out to the middle of the St. Lawrence and dumped it.”
Before they did, Stovell said the batch was mixed with formaldehyde to kill off the spores.
Inès Levade, a clinical specialist in medical biology, is one of the few people in Canada who works with anthrax today. She said that whether the soldiers were successful in killing off the bacteria would depend on how much formaldehyde they added.
“The only way to have an answer to that question would be to find the barrels and test them,” she said.
The Department of National Defence refused a request for comment from Radio-Canada. In 2010, however, Bernard and Frigon say they were told by the federal defence minister that they had no information that would indicate that anthrax was thrown into the St. Lawrence River.
“They told us: ‘We lost the documents. The only boxes with information about Project N were lost over the course of a move,'” said Bernard.
“Who’s going to believe that?”
Alex Souchen, an associate professor at the University of Guelph, specializes in the history of munitions disposal.
Before the barrel was tested, he said his first thought when he heard about the police operation on Île aux Canards was: “Nothing good could be inside that barrel.”
Christine and Sébastien LeBlanc with the barrel they found. Radio-Canada visited them in the Isle-aux-Grues archipelago in the summer of 2026. (Matthew Joycey/Radio-Canada)
Souchen explained that it’s not uncommon for historical relics from the Second World War to turn up in water.
“There’s millions of tons worldwide of conventional and chemical weapons that were put into ships and sunk or that were thrown overboard item by item,” he said. For soldiers, it was the quickest, most direct way of destroying large numbers of weapons during a global push for disarmament.
In Canada, Souchen said these munitions were largely dumped in Nova Scotia, but some were disposed of from military bases along the St. Lawrence River or as ships made their way back to Montreal to be sold off.
Police bomb squad responds to ancient barrel sighted near island in St. Lawrence River
He said that the historical records of what has been dumped by the Canadian military is thin, as they would have been legally destroyed at regular intervals over the last 80 years.
The emphasis from the military is not presently to disarm underwater munitions, though they are discovered regularly by fishers — something Souchen called “a very dangerous, very threatening situation that the government needs to do more to address.”
He believes there should be more emphasis from the military to identify what has been dumped in the water and the impact it has on the environment.
“They’re not going out to these sites and monitoring them in the same way that other countries are doing,” he said.
Federal Defence Minister David McGuinty was notified of the barrel’s existence, and the SQ says it will now transfer it to the Environment Ministry for further analysis and disposal.
