About Le Soleil de Châteauguay

Le Soleil de Châteauguay

Overview

Le Soleil de Châteauguay is a free French-language weekly newspaper serving Châteauguay and the surrounding municipalities of the Montérégie region, southwest of Montreal. Published in tabloid format, it covers Châteauguay itself along with Mercier, Léry and Beauharnois, across the Roussillon and Beauharnois-Salaberry regional county municipalities. The paper is owned by Gravité Média, the South Shore media group whose other titles include Le Courrier du Sud, Le Reflet, Le Journal Saint-François and La Relève. Its website operates under the name Cyber Soleil at cybersoleil.com. The paper should not be confused with Le Soleil, the long-established daily newspaper in Quebec City, or with the defunct Le Soleil de Valleyfield, a separate publication that once served the Valleyfield area.

History

Reference works date the founding of Le Soleil de Châteauguay to 1977. During the 1980s the paper passed into the hands of Les Hebdos Montérégiens, the regional publishing company owned by the Auclair family, and it remained part of that stable for roughly three decades. In 2011 the Auclair family sold Les Hebdos Montérégiens and the fifteen or so publications it comprised, including Le Soleil de Châteauguay, to Québecor, which folded them into its Sun Media subsidiary. Two years later, in 2013, Sun Media sold its entire portfolio of 74 regional publications to TC Media, and the Châteauguay paper changed hands again as part of that transaction.

The decisive change came in 2017, when TC Media moved to divest its local and regional newspapers across Quebec and Ontario, a process it had made public on 18 April of that year. On 23 August 2017 TC Media announced the sale of six publications — Le Journal Saint-François, Le Soleil de Châteauguay, Brossard Éclair, Le Courrier du Sud, L'Information d'Affaires Rive-Sud and Le Reflet — to Gravité Média, a newly formed group that included Julie Voyer, who had been TC Media's general manager for the Montérégie region. The 55 employees of the six publications transferred to the buyer, along with nine further employees from TC Media's production and finance teams, and TC Transcontinental signed a multi-year agreement to continue printing and distributing the titles. Gravité Média was formally founded on that transaction, dated 23 August 2017, and Le Soleil de Châteauguay has been part of the group ever since. The new owner's portfolio later contracted and expanded again: Brossard Éclair was fully merged into Le Courrier du Sud in 2019, while in 2023 Gravité acquired La Relève of Boucherville from Groupe Messier, a transaction effective 29 September 2023.

Programming and Content

Le Soleil de Châteauguay is a general-interest local paper. Its reporting concentrates on the municipal politics of Châteauguay and its neighbouring towns, urban development, court and police news, culture and community life. Stories shared by the paper in June 2026 illustrate the range: a report on the Club des petits jardiniers, an early-childhood gardening program for vulnerable children aged 0 to 5 at the CLSC de Châteauguay; coverage of the City of Beauharnois's request that Quebec's transport ministry study a new Autoroute 30 exit at Léry; and a story on Châteauguay tenants whose building was disturbed by renovation workers lacking competency cards. The website also carries syndicated service content, including the technology chronicles of columnist François Charron, whose weekly tech column recaps have appeared on cybersoleil.com in 2026.

Audience and Reach

The paper's circulation territory follows the southwestern edge of the Montreal metropolitan area: the city of Châteauguay and its Roussillon RCM neighbours, and the municipalities of Mercier, Léry and Beauharnois in the Beauharnois-Salaberry RCM. Within Gravité Média's portfolio, Le Soleil de Châteauguay is the group's western anchor: when the company acquired La Relève in 2023, it described its newspapers as covering almost the entire territory between the Vaudreuil-Soulanges RCM in the west and Contrecoeur in the east, passing through Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, Châteauguay, Candiac and the Longueuil agglomeration. For most of its life the free paper reached households through the Publisac advertising bundle. That channel disappeared when TC Transcontinental ended the Publisac in November 2023, a decision that shook the entire Quebec weekly press; the bundle's earlier withdrawal from Montreal had already contributed to the failure of Métro Média, publisher of the Journal Métro and most of Montreal's and Quebec City's neighbourhood weeklies. Like the other Gravité Média titles, Le Soleil de Châteauguay shifted to distribution through Canada Post and drop-off points; the paper has been reported as available at roughly one hundred drop-off points in its territory, while Gravité Média states that its publications together are distributed through nearly 1,000 drop-off points. No audited circulation figure for the Châteauguay title itself is published, and none is asserted here.

Digital Presence

The paper's digital home is cybersoleil.com, where it publishes under the Cyber Soleil name. The site carries the week's local news from Châteauguay and its surroundings, and the paper promotes its stories through social channels, including an official Bluesky account that was posting new cybersoleil.com articles in June 2026 — evidence that the title continues to publish on a current weekly cycle. Back issues of the print paper from 2013 onward are also preserved through the Eureka database, as recorded in Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec's list of Quebec newspapers available online. The website itself is the paper's principal storefront: Gravité Média presents its titles as combined print-and-web publications, with social-media accounts and an RSS-fed group podcast extending their reach. In August 2026 the trade publication Grenier aux nouvelles reported that Gravité Média was tightening the links between its brands: the group's five newspapers, including Le Soleil de Châteauguay, would keep their names and territorial anchoring while adding a shared "Gravité INFO" brand to their mastheads, and a new lifestyle brand, Gravité MAV, would be developed alongside them. Gravité's president Julie Voyer told the trade publication that each of the group's properties worked well independently but did not yet form a recognizable common brand — the gap the 2026 rebranding was meant to close — while insisting that readers, subscribers and listeners would see no interruption to their service.

Ownership and Organisation

Le Soleil de Châteauguay is owned by Gravité Média, a privately held media company formed in August 2017 around the purchase of the six TC Media publications on Montreal's South Shore. The group's president is Julie Voyer, who had run the same publications as TC Media's general manager for Montérégie before leading the buyout. Gravité Média is organized into a media and web division — Le Courrier du Sud, Le Reflet, Le Soleil de Châteauguay, Le Journal Saint-François, La Relève and the online business publication L'Information d'affaires d'ici — and a marketing division offering digital and advertising services. The Châteauguay paper is produced within the group's shared South Shore operation, which reference works place in Candiac, the same publishing base as its sister paper Le Reflet; editorial and production resources are pooled across the group's titles, with individual journalists contributing to more than one Gravité publication.

Contact and Availability

Le Soleil de Châteauguay is a free newspaper: readers can pick it up at drop-off points in Châteauguay, Mercier, Léry and Beauharnois, receive it through the group's distribution arrangements, or read it online at cybersoleil.com, where the current week's stories are posted. The paper publishes weekly in French. Readers and advertisers deal with the paper through Gravité Média, whose media division operates the title alongside its South Shore sister publications and whose marketing division sells advertising and digital services across the group's titles.