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“For now I think we have to take our time and reinforce lots of regulations that we don’t even have,” Daniel Gauthier, a 61-year-old farmer from Saint-Marcel, a village about two hours from Quebec City, said in an interview at a Calgary news conference. “It is a good thing to take our time; it is best to wait.”

Popular support for fracking, which involves pumping a mixture of water, sand and other chemicals deep underground at high pressure to fracture rocks and access the resources trapped inside, is lower in Quebec than anywhere else in Canada.

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Just 22% of Quebecers support fracking, according to an Angus Reid survey released last month, well below the national average of 31% and less than half of the 46% of Albertans who support fracking.

In April, Quebec moved from a de facto ban on shale gas development to an outright moratorium, halting all projects until after the government’s Strategic Environmental Assessment Committee issues a report late next year.

This week’s tour was largely dismissed as “propaganda” back in Quebec.

Mr. Gauthier said he felt the same way before he was invited to join the tour and “more [so] now.”

His village sits atop the Utica Shale formation, which geologists say could contain the world’s largest single accumulation of natural gas confined to a single rock unit.

Questerre Energy Corp., a Calgary-based exploration firm with development rights to more than one million gross acres of Quebec farmland that helped organized logistics for the tour, estimates as much as 18 trillion cubic feet of natural gas could lie beneath its holdings alone.