Léo-Paul Lauzon, ex-professor of accounting at UQAM, is quite a number. A man of the left with a popular verve, he taunts with cheerful effrontery the unrepentant rich of this world and their political and intellectual cronies.
“I’m not saying overtax anyone,” he wrote. I just want everyone to pay their fair share of taxes, both businesses and individuals. That is a true fact: the economic elites have a real tax rate lower than that of the middle class. »
This economic scandal is mostly considered a fatality by ordinary citizens. Lauzon, although he holds an MBA from HEC Montreal and a doctorate in management from the University of Grenoble, was born poor in the Faubourg à m’lasse. He therefore vehemently rejects social injustice, which is first and foremost a moral scandal.
Allow me, here, a testimony. In 1997, I participated, as a simple activist, in the founding convention of the Rassemblement pour une alternative politique, one of the ancestors of Québec solidaire. On this occasion, Lauzon gave a whole solo show. Armed with his transparencies, on which were reproduced press articles reporting economic news, he made the assembly collapse with laughter by illustrating the greed and immorality of capitalists here and elsewhere. It was magical. This accountant left, very funny, gave the taste to fight. For all sorts of reasons, I quickly left the ranks of this party, but I remained attached to the disheveled figure of the outraged accountant.
With A time of lies (M éditor, 2023, 248 pages), a collection of his blog posts published from 2017 to 2022, Lauzon strikes again. The method is the same: glean, mainly from Quebec newspapers, articles on economic life that expose in broad daylight the iniquity engendered by capitalism.
The style has not changed either, although the publisher, in this book, imposes on him the confusing rules of inclusive writing (iels, ceusses, celleux): in a popular, colorful verve, Lauzon jokes, without nuance, to the moguls who take themselves for the navel of the world.
Finally, the ideas remain: advocacy for an equitable distribution of wealth and for progressive taxation; bias for workers; defending quality public services and social programs; fight, finally, against the excesses of the market and for the protection of the environment. That’s good, actually, from a classic leftist perspective.
Lauzon, with good reason, can no longer stand the charity spectacle of the rich who pose as patrons when all of their work engenders misery. His criticism of so-called charitable foundations hits home. He bluntly denounces the hypocrisy of wealthy donors “who, on the one hand, are responsible for the dismantling of our social programs by dodging their taxes to be paid in a thousand and one ways and, on the other, by playing the map of generous, good-natured philanthropists ready to help their neighbors” (sic). Mental health, he writes, is not through “Bell Let’s Talk,” but through well-funded public social programs through taxes from those who can afford it.
Fiercely critical of banks that make huge profits by bleeding their ordinary customers by raising fees and interest rates, Lauzon, who pleads in passing for the creation of a Quebec public bank, does not spare the Mouvement Desjardins . He accuses the latter of betraying its cooperative principles and offering falsely green funds, made up of shares in oil and mining companies. One day, in a credit union, I made this remark to a financial adviser, who replied that everyone needed gasoline in their car. That’s Desjardins green.
A fierce opponent of the private sector in health, Lauzon slays the greed of pharmaceutical companies, private insurers and doctors, who incorporate to escape the tax authorities, with the complicity of governments. When the services expected by the population are not there due to a lack of funding, which is to say very often, supposedly wise minds offer even more private healthcare, as if the problem could be the solution.
Lauzon, it’s true, is biased and rather messy. Without him, however, inconvenient truths would remain unspoken. He loses his bearings, however, when he closes his eyes to the failures of countries—Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and a few others—that oppose the Western capitalist model.
His recent defense of Russia, in the war in Ukraine, testifies to a taste for controversy that is poorly controlled. Criticizing our economic model is certainly necessary, but opposing it to the Russian and Cuban models is ideological blindness.