Treasure Island: Making a Mint on Lasqueti Island

Image by: Nik West

A couple of aging hippies are making a mint — literally — on Lasqueti, a remote Gulf Island filled with draft dodgers, pot growers and escapists.

The Lasqueti Mint isn’t guarded by motion-sensing alarms, thıck cement walls or menacing guards. It’s not even hooked up to hydro or accessible by road. Instead it’s in the middle of nowhere on Lasqueti Island, an off-the-grid Strait of Georgia rock near Texada Island, accessible by passenger ferry only from Vancouver Island.

Its security system is what also makes it a refuge for U.S. draft dodgers, pot growers and escapists:
isolation. It is here, in this unlikely location, that Tolling Jennings and Ray Lipovsky are literally minting money.

“What we originally wanted to do was get precious metals into the hands of people in the Gulf Islands to support the economy and to get precious metals back into the currency,” Jennings explains. “Since then it’s taken on a life of its own, and it has been more successful than we could have hoped.”

Coins pressed at this remote B.C. mint are used every day to buy goods and services on Lasqueti, Gabriola and Salt Spring islands. Numismatists (coin collectors) who own Lasqueti Mint proofs – coins only meant for collecting – are seeing the value of their collections grow by up to 500 per cent. And in an industry first, the Lasqueti Mint is sourcing gold directly from Yukon mines, adding value to placer mining. Jennings, not your textbook entrepreneur, admits almost reluctantly that commercial minting has turned out to be a viable business. “But that was never the point,” he stresses. “It was always a labour of love.”

Of the 350 people who call Lasqueti home, about one in seven is an accomplished ultimate-Frisbee player. Back in 1996, Jennings, who was coaching a couple of the teams, took a bag of old coins to Lipovsky, an island jeweller, in the hopes of selling them to raise money for team travel. Talk turned from ultimate to coins to currencies. “We were on the same page with a lot of things,” Jennings says, including the lunacy of the unbacked paper-money system of the Western world.

Jennings explains it like this: governments such as Canada’s have stopped backing currency with precious metals, removing the currency’s ability to store value. “The only promise they give is that they can print more,” Jennings says. And governments do, diluting the money supply and driving up inflation. Since 1900, Jennings says, the real value of the Canadian dollar has fallen more than 90 per cent. Eventually, the theory goes, with nothing of tangible value backing them, inflation will render government-issued currencies worthless. “To hedge against this inflation, you need something that will hold value: land or precious metals,” says Jennings. “Land is expensive. Everyone can afford to buy metals.”

Lipovsky had a drop hammer used for pressing imprints into metal, so he and Jennings decided to help Gulf Island residents prepare for currency Armageddon by getting some precious-metal coins into circulation. “It was a total hoot, but we didn’t have a clue what we were doing,” Jennings recalls.
They bought some raw metal, cut it to size and weight, and then loaded the drop hammer – basically a 23-kilogram weight dropped guillotine-style onto a die that imprints the coin. The first coin went flying across the room.

Eventually, Jennings and Lipovsky got the process under control and set up shop in a secret spot, powering it with wind and solar energy. The first run of $20 pure-silver Lasqueti coins was minted in 1997 and sold locally to raise money for a trip to the ultimate nationals. “We had no idea how they would be accepted,” Jennings remembers. He needn’t have worried; the run sold out in a couple of weeks. At the nationals, the Lasqueti teams used the coins for the pre-game toss. The organizers of the ultimate worlds were so impressed with the pieces, they commissioned some to give away as awards. It was the mint’s first contract sale.

Business ticked along, and soon Jennings and Lipovsky were printing coins for use as local currency. In Canada anyone can mint metal bullion, as long as it meets a few criteria; for instance, it can’t have the Queen’s face on it. Best of all, such currency is tax exempt. “When you tell that to people around here, their eyes light up,” Jennings says. The currency is bought into a local market and then used to buy goods and services. The idea is nothing new. Local currencies are used all over the world to encourage economic development. The Lasqueti Mint took it one step further by hiring local artists to design the coins, making them collectable works of art.

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