By Louis S. St. Laurent II

Yves Beauchamp and I had no idea, when we bought Le Soleil de La Floride in 2001, that it would expand as much as it has. The purchase from Transcontinental in Montreal was right before the attack on the twin towers in New York resulting in a large decease in Canadian tourism to Florida. However, year after year, the newspaper kept expanding and new technology was introduced, such as the digital edition for Le Soleil de La Floride (www.lesoleildelafloride.com) becoming available on line reaching everyone around the world. Others tried to compete with us or reach this same market but were unsuccessful as they could not compete with the fact that Le Soleil de la Floride had become so well known throughout Quebec and other provinces with a large French population, and by the Canadian news media.

Time after time, the staff of Le Soleil de la Floride conducts interviews with various Canadian news media organizations on everything from politics, real estate and current events of interest to Canadians. The Canadian news media can depend on our newspaper to assist them when they are unable to cover an event in person in Florida. Both, Yves Beauchamp and I, make every effort to help, including interviews as early as 6 a.m. until midnight.

The circulation of the newspaper has expanded from Miami to Fort Pierce and is in such demand that we lately had to increase the number of copies to 16,000 per week in Florida alone.

The way you judge a newspaper is by the results you produce for your advertisers. From real estate to banking, hotels, restaurants, personal services, renovation, cable TV and construction, our advertisers tell us that they are having better results than they ever expected from their Le Soleil de la Floride advertising. You can judge our success from the names of the large advertisers that are now advertising in the newspaper. Their marketing firms found that our newspaper was the best way to reach the French Canadian market in Florida.

We have never changed our goal of informing Canadians, visiting Florida, about what to do and see in sunshine state. We have never seen our function as being a Florida news media to inform Canadians about what is happening in Canada. That’s why you have Canadian newspapers. When Canadians are in Florida, we feel that they want to read about Florida events, attractions and people in Florida. Yves Beauchamp and I will continue doing this.

The newspaper is very well respected and we try to advise our readership about potential problems they may have when visiting or buying in Florida. We aim our stories towards both the short term visitors and the Canadian snowbirds. It is our goal to inform Canadians travelling to Florida about this great state where Canadians, in increasing numbers, are making Florida their winter getaway from the cold or their retirement in paradise.