McGill Sports Hall of Famer Verreault-Paul elected to head the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador
By Earl Zukerman
Francis Verreault-Paul, a 2023 inductee to the Sports Hall of Fame at McGill University, has been elected to head the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador (AFNQL). The prolific hockey player who hails from the Innu community of Mashteuiatsh, near Roberval, Que., secured 21 votes in a single round of voting Tuesday in Quebec City. With 36 of the 43 community chiefs casting ballots, he received approximately 58 per cent of the vote. He needed more than half to win the election.
Verreault-Paul, 37, has served as Ghislain Picard's chief of staff for the past two years. Picard, who held the AFNQL leadership for 33 years, decided not to run for another term this year.
Recruited to the university ranks from the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, he skated for the Chicoutimi Sagueneen. At McGill, he was a three-time OUA conference all-star, who twice earned All-Canadian honours, in 2009-10 and 2010-11. He helped lead McGill to three consecutive Queen's Cup league titles as OUA champs (2010, 2011, 2012) and twice led the team to the championship game at the Nationals, held in Fredericton, N.B., winning silver in 2011 and gold in 2012 to capture the school's first CIS University Cup.
From 2008 to 2012, the feisty, 5-foot-10, 180-pound forward produced a lifetime mark of 120 goals and 221 points and in 156 games overall during his four seasons at McGill. A prolific sniper, he registered a school record 21 career game-winning markers to go along with 48 power-play goals, eight hat-tricks and a pair of shorthanded tallies.
More than a decade after his McGill career ended, he still ranks second among the school's all-time goal-scoring leaders and sits fourth in points. Verreault-Paul also collected a whopping 642 penalty minutes to rank second among career leaders in that department.
In regular season play, he posted an 87-69-156 record in 93 games, with 371 PIMs. He was the league's top goal scorer in each of his sophomore, junior and senior years, leading the country in both, his second and third seasons. He twice won the OUA scoring title, accomplishing that feat in 2009-10 and 2011-12.
Verreault-Paul won a plethora of awards in 2009-10, including the Bobby Bell Trophy (Team MVP), the Forbes Trophy (McGill's male athlete of the year), the Bill L'Heureux Trophy (OUA player of the year) and the Guy Lafleur Trophy, presented by the Montreal Canadiens to the Quebec University hockey player who best combines hockey with academics and citizenship. He was the Quebec conference finalist for a BLG award, presented to the Canadian university athlete of the year. He later collected the Jack Kennedy Trophy (OUA championship tournament MVP) in 2010, the Molson Cup (most three-star selections) in 2011 and the Major W.J. 'Danny' McLeod Award (CIS tourney MVP) in 2012.
Weeks after leading McGill to the University Cup title, Verreault-Paul was signed by the Hershey Bears, the American Hockey League affiliate of the NHL's Washington Capitals. He had a lengthy pro career, including stints in the ECHL, Switzerland, Denmark, Italy and England.
During his time with the ECHL's Bakersfield Condors, he briefly became the centre of attention during an amusing pregame incident when a giant condor broke loose from his handler during the national anthem and swooped towards him on the player's bench.
In eight seasons at the pro level, Verreault-Paul posted a 92-161-253 record in 400 games with 598 PIMs while playing for Milton Keynes in the British Elite Ice Hockey League. He earned a science degree in 2017 from McGill, where he majored in psychology, and an MBA from the University of Buckingham in the U.K.
After retiring from pro hockey in 2020, he served as head of the Centre Nikanite for First Nations program at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. In 2022, he moved to Quebec City, to assume the role of director communications and government relations for the First Nations Education Council.