Remparts de Québec

A club that died twice before it settled

The Remparts began in 1969, when a group of investors bought the junior Quebec Aces and put them into the Colisée de Québec. The first version of the club was immediately good: five President's Cups as league champions in 1969-70, 1970-71, 1972-73, 1975-76 and 1976-77, and a Memorial Cup in 1971. Operations stopped after the 1984-85 season.

What happened next is the part most summaries skip. The dormant franchise reappeared under a Collège Français banner in Longueuil from 1988 to 1991, moved to Verdun from 1991 to 1994, and then folded outright. The team playing in Quebec City today descends from a different licence: the Beauport Harfangs, founded in 1990-91, who relocated into the city in 1997. For two seasons they played at PEPS, Laval University's rink, before moving to the Colisée in 1999. The 2026-27 campaign is the thirtieth since that 1997 return, which is why the club counts its captains and its playoff appearances from that year rather than from 1969.

Lafleur, then Roy, then a 5-0 final

The 1971 Memorial Cup side had Guy Lafleur in it, which is the fact that carried the name through the years the club did not exist. The second title took thirty-five years and arrived under a rookie head coach: Patrick Roy, whose debut season ended on 28 May 2006 with a 6-2 win over Moncton. That team became the first to win a Memorial Cup without having won its own league championship.

The third came on 4 June 2023 at the Sandman Centre in Kamloops, where the Remparts beat the Seattle Thunderbirds 5-0 in the final of the 103rd Memorial Cup. Quebec had gone straight to the championship game by finishing first in the round robin. William Rousseau stopped all 32 shots he faced; James Malatesta took the Stafford Smythe Memorial Trophy as tournament most valuable player after five goals in four games. It was the high point of a 26-year association between Roy and the organisation, and effectively its end — he left that summer.

Ownership has been stable through all of it since Québecor bought the club in November 2014 for a reported $20-25 million, and moved it out of the Colisée and into the new Centre Vidéotron when that building opened on 12 September 2015.

Gagné and Veilleux, and a plan with a date attached

Simon Gagné, who played his junior hockey in Quebec City before a long NHL career, took over as general manager in the summer of 2023 and hired Éric Veilleux as head coach on 6 July 2023, on a five-year deal. Veilleux, a Montrealer, was 51 at the time and had been an assistant to Benoît Groulx with the AHL's Syracuse Crunch; he had won a Memorial Cup as head coach of the Shawinigan Cataractes in 2012 and had previously run Baie-Comeau and Halifax. He is the fifth head coach the club has had since 1997. Gagné's stated criteria at the time were experience, leadership, work ethic and passion; Veilleux, for his part, described what he was walking into as a rebuild, and said so plainly on the day he was hired.

Three seasons later he is still saying it. Gagné told Le Soleil in September 2026 that the plan runs to 2028 and that the club is heading in the right direction. The club's bid to host the 2028 Memorial Cup is still awaiting CHL approval, which gives the rebuild an unusually hard target: a roster that peaks in the season the tournament would come to Quebec City.

2025-26: one round won, then swept

Last season the Remparts went 32-25-6-1 for 71 points, fifth in the Eastern Conference and ninth overall in the QMJHL. It was the club's 28th playoff appearance since 1997. They were not a scoring team — Le Soleil's Jonathan Hudon noted they had the fifth-best defensive record in the league and an airtight, unshowy style — and they were oddly poor at home, 14-13-4-1 at the Centre Vidéotron.

The first round against the fourth-seeded Charlottetown Islanders went the distance in a 2-3-2 format, opening at the Eastlink Centre on 27 March 2026. Quebec avoided elimination and then won game seven 1-0 in Charlottetown on 7 April in front of 2,939 spectators. Xavier Lebel scored at 16:20 of the first period, from Charles-Antoine Dubé and Antoine Dorion; goaltender Patrick Déniger made 22 saves for his first playoff shutout, having posted five in the regular season along with a 2.33 goals-against average in 30 games.

The second round was the club's first since the 2023 championship run, and it was short. Chicoutimi took the first two games narrowly, then widened it, and completed a 4-0 sweep on 15 April. The Saguenéens went on to win the league. Part of the problem was geography: Chicoutimi's Centre Georges-Vézina has Olympic-sized ice, and the series swung on how each side handled the change in surface.

Where the club stands in September 2026

The 2026-27 roster was confirmed on 4 September: 25 players, two goaltenders, 15 forwards and eight defencemen, with 11 returnees and 14 new faces. Déniger is back in goal. The camp's genuine surprise was 17-year-old Timothy Dubuc, a seventh-round pick from 2025 who took the backup job outright; Gagné said he had filled out physically and compared him to Quentin Miller at the same age. Alex Culligan, a 19-year-old defenceman in on a guest-player basis, played every exhibition game and earned a spot, as did forwards Blake Cash and Samuel Huot despite veteran arrivals. Zackary Plamondon came in from Charlottetown on defence; Alexandre Taillefer, barely used last season through injury, is now described by his general manager as close to a first-pairing defenceman.

Gagné's warning about a roster aged 16 to 20 was blunt — it does not take much for a team like this to slip, and the coaching staff's job is to notice before it does. Training camp opened on 18 August, with six exhibition games between 21 August and 12 September.

The building, and the season in front of them

The Centre Vidéotron cost $370 million, seats 18,259 for hockey and was designed by Populous with ABCP Architecture and GLCRM. It is deliberately steep — the upper bowl is angled sharply enough that local building codes forced a safety rail on every row — and the Remparts filled it completely for their first game there, a league attendance record of 18,259.

The 2026-27 schedule, published on 16 June, runs 64 games, 32 of them at home. The season starts tonight, 18 September, away at the Sherbrooke Phoenix. The home opener is Friday 25 September against Shawinigan at 7pm, and the regular season closes on Saturday 20 March 2027 with Rimouski visiting.