Out of financial resources, a factory in Bas-Saint-Laurent decided to sell sponsorships for each month of the year in order to heat its church.
Like several parishes in Quebec, the Saint-André-de-Kamouraska factory is struggling to make ends meet due in particular to rising energy costs.
As heating the religious building costs approximately $12,000 per year, the members had the idea of offering merchants and businesses in the small municipality of 658 residents the opportunity to pay $1,000 to sponsor a month of heating.
“For several years, our church’s operating budget has been put to the test. In addition, cost inflation increases our operating costs,” we can read in the municipal newspaper for the month of February.
The fundraiser was launched last December. Last February, at least five companies had confirmed they were buying a month and more responses were awaited.
The first to make a financial commitment to preserve the oldest church in Bas-Saint-Laurent were the churchwardens who collected the famous sum of $1000 for heating for the month of February.
A municipality like no other
It must be said that the very dynamic municipality of Saint-André-de-Kamouraska has never done things like others.
In 2017, Mayor Gervais Darisse announced that his community was going mosquito hunting while 28 mosquito terminals were installed in the municipality.
At the end of the summer season, the mayor even made public the statistics claiming that more than a million mosquitoes, 1,080,000 to be very precise, had been captured.
In 2008, Saint-André-de-Kamouraska was also one of the first 50 municipalities in Quebec to bury its electrical wires over nearly a kilometer in the heart of the village.
I know it can be confusing on March 31, but this is not an April Fool’s joke.