History
Le Soleil rose from the ashes of L'Électeur, the official newspooper of the Liberal Party of Canada, which shut down in December 1896. The first edition was published on December 28, 1896. one day after the disappearance of its predecessor, which shut down because the Catholic clergy had forbidden it to parishioners when the newspaper criticized the Church's electoral interference.
In 1957, Le Soleil (then owned by Oscar Gilbert) cut ties to the Liberal Party of Canada in order to concentrate on news coverage. Daily circulation rose past 100,000 in the 1960s, and over 150,000 in the 1970s.
Beginning in 1973, many large corporations began to express interest in acquiring Le Soleil. Controversy was stirred when Paul Desmarais's Power Corporation of Canada announced its intention to buy the daily. It provoked the intervention of then-Quebec premier Robert Bourassa because such a transaction would have concentrated 70% of Quebec francophone daily newspapers in the hands of a single company. Eventually the paper was bought by Unimédia.
In 1987, Conrad Black's Hollinger Inc. acquired the newspaper. It would eventually pass into the hands of Groupe Gesca, which also owns several Quebec newspapers, and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Power Corporation of Canada.
In 2006, the newspaper had switched to a tabloid format at the same time as Sherbrooke's La Tribune and Trois-Rivières's Le Nouvelliste, all owned by Gesca. Recent declines in readership due to competition by Le Journal de Québec was the main explanation of the switch from a broadsheet format.
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