Southwest Point Lighthouse

Background:

Dating from 1831, this magnificent 24 m. tall stone tower with lantern and gallery originally painted white with two horizontal red bands is falling quickly into ruin. It is easily a match to scores of stone towers now preserved in the United States.

Inactive since the early 1990s, this endangered lighthouse offers a textbook example of the inadequacy of Canadian government lighthouse preservation. Only 3 % of Canadian lighthouses have genuine heritage protection and only 12% have even partial protection.

Current federal policy is to sell historic lighthouses off to the highest bidder. Many that are still owned by the Canadian government are severely neglected due to the funding cuts at the Canadian Coast Guard. 

The Coast Guard abandoned the Southwest Point historic lighthouse and razed its keepers houses to let it lie rotting. Action is needed now to prevent the loss of the lighthouse later.

The new federal government has the opportunity to reintroduce The Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act which was at Second Reading in the House of Commons before the government was dissolved in 2005.

Update: In August 2011, the top of the lighthouse collapsed.

Location: Anticosti Island, Quebec

Top 10 Endangered Places List: 2006

Status: Endangered