The Nova Scotia government is going to destroy 20,000 tourist maps because of an embarrassing mistake.

The French-language version misspells the word road in the title — road map or "carte routière." In the printed maps, the accent is on the right letter but it's the wrong accent.

It will cost the province another $5,000 to reprint the corrected map. Fortunately, most of the maps haven't been distributed yet.

​Patrick Sullivan, the CEO of Nova Scotia Tourism Agency, called the mistake "extremely" embarrassing.

"I'm not happy about it and clearly we have a process that normally works in this case," he said. "We have all of our materials checked and this slipped through."

Sullivan said his agency learned of the error when a "concerned citizen" pointed it out on Wednesday. That triggered an immediate recall.

He said the agency uses proofreaders to double check material before it's printed. He doesn't know how this error made it past that part of the process.

Quebec is identified as a "key market" for the province. In 2010, 96,200 Quebecers visited the province, most of them for pleasure.