Cantley woman wins $55M jackpot
Cantley resident Linda Phillips held onto a Loto-Québec ticket worth $55 million for over a month before realizing she had won the jackpot.
Phillips sat down with Loto-Québec presenter Anick Dumontet for an interview, which was issued with a press release about the jackpot winner of the Oct. 30 Lotto Max pull.
“We were waiting for you, where was the ticket?” Dumontet asked.
Phillips said that she keeps her lottery tickets in a bowl in her kitchen. About 10 were in it for quite a while when she was cleaning one night and she asked her son to check them for her.
“My son said ‘Mum, mum! Come here!’ And I thought, honestly, something awful happened for a minute, and I went running up the stairs … and he said, ‘You’ve won,’” Phillips explained.
She thought it was a mistake until putting the ticket into a lottery machine to double-check it. She then hid the winning ticket under the mattress for safekeeping and locked her house up tight.
“You have no idea how happy I am,” she said.
She doesn’t buy lottery tickets weekly, but does when the prize gets big or she has a bad day at work. She was buying scratch tickets as gifts for her grandchildren and son, and, while buying them, she saw the $55 million jackpot, so she bought a couple of lottery tickets. She knew that the jackpot ticket had been sold, but since it wasn’t announced that it was sold in Cantley, she didn’t think it was hers.
When asked what her plans are with the winnings, Phillips said she had been planning her retirement next year, but has moved those plans up. Other than that, she wants to take care of her family.