Here's a want ad you don't often come across: FOR SALE: One tropical island in the Bahamas, 184 kilometres long by two kilometres wide, situated 80 kilometres east of Nassau. Terms: 99-year lease. Price: One dollar.

This is not a late April Fool's joke. The island of Eleuthera was actually available to a select Canadian buyer for the above-mentioned terms back in 1985. The prospective purchaser? Quebec. The province's then-Minister of Tourism under Rene Levesque had painstakingly hammered out a tentative deal with the prime minister of the Bahamas. Quebec would assume ownership of Eleuthera for the princely outlay of one loonie - and a promise to 'hire local labour' where possible. Catches, tricks or loopholes? None.

Naturellement, the Quebec cabinet turned the deal down.

Well, that's Quebec for ya, is it not? Perverse. Masochistic. Ever on the lookout for a new and different way to shaft itself with the short end of the hockey stick. Man, you give the rest of Canada an opportunity to bag a brand new, tropical paradise and we'd be all over it like sun tan oil on a bald guy's head, right?

Wrong. Ottawa had its chance to adopt a tropical paradise. Not just one island either - two whole chains of them. Back in 1987, a delegation of politicians from the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean actually visited Ottawa, hats in hand, openly seeking a shotgun marriage.

They wanted us to take them in, people! They begged to become part of Canada. They would bring to us thirty surf-massaged islands festooned with bedazzling sand beaches, seductively undulating palm trees and a few thousand hard-working, friendly, Christian, English-speaking natives. We would offer political stability, hemispheric solidarity with another British Commonwealth entity, the protection of our armed forces (we could commandeer two submarines from the West Edmonton mall, if necessary)....

Oh yeah - and every year around the beginning of November, an invasion of approximately thirty million sun-starved, fishbelly-white fellow-citizen tourists.

A no-brainer, right? Thirty tropical islands? Our nation's very own West Indian resort destination? William Seward paid $7,000,000 to buy Alaska from Russia back in 1867. That worked out pretty well. We were being offered a tropical archipelago with inhouse lobster - no icebergs, glaciers or black flies - for free!

And our learned leaders passed. Incredibly, this was not the first time. Away back in 1917, Prime Minister Robert Borden proposed we annex the Turks and Caicos outright. His own government nixed the idea. In 1974, a brilliant, forward thinking Ontario

NDP Member of Parliament by the name of Max Saltsman introduced a bill proposing consolidation of the islands under the Canadian flag. His colleagues yawned and slumbered on. Even as late as 2004, MP Peter Goldring, representing the federal Tories, hopped a jet to the islands to explore the idea first hand. He went, he saw, he presented his findings to a government committee. And then, nothing. Once again, a golden opportunity sank like a harpooned beluga.

The nabobs of negativism who scuttle the idea every time it bobs up have all kinds of nervous Nellie, quintessentially Canadian reasons. We'd have to amend the Canadian constitution they say. It might offend other provinces and make them jealous, they claim. Besides, it's economically risky.

I say: Are You Nuts? So what if we have to amend the constitution? We did it for Newfoundland in '49; we do it for Quebec about every six months.

Other provincial noses will be out of joint? Here's a thought: Get Over It. Economically risky? Canadians leave behind billions of loonies each winter in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, Hawaii and the so-called Sunshine States. How bad could it be if we spent all that money in a place that collects and pays Canadian taxes?

Stephen, Stephane, Jack - could you just for once pull together on this one thing? For the greater Canadian good?

Gilles Duceppe? You could come on board too. We've already seen you in a hairnet. You'd be a knockout in a grass skirt.