Significant change is necessary, says Alexan

Nadia Alexan is mad as hell and she’s trying to do something about it. The Quebec Solidaire candidate for Westmount—St. Louis is running for the second time, promoting the party’s agenda of social justice and environmental responsibility. “Social justice doesn’t exist right now,” she said. “When half the people on the planet are starving and many of them are living on $1 a day or less, it’s sickening.”

She said problems have been getting worse in Quebec over the last 30 years, with the gap between rich and poor widening and multinational corporations gaining more power over government. “Wealth is trickling up right now,” she said. “Corporations are engage in stealing, in public theft.”

The problem is particularly egregious in Quebec, she said. Corporations in Quebec pay an average of four per cent in taxes, far less than they should be paying, according to Alexan. “Through corporate tax evasion, Quebec is losing about $8 billion a year,” she said. Combine that with the fact that 40 per cent of working Quebecers make $20,000 or less before taxes, the resulting imbalance reveals a glaring problem, she said.

Alexan herself is a retired high school teacher who has been a dedicated community activist for years. She started the Montreal chapter of the Council of Canadians in 1996 and current heads the Citizens in Action group, which holds a meeting at Concordia every month. She holds three different degrees, in English, Political Science, and Political Science. She was named Woman of the year in 2003 by local French circular Place Publique for her work against the privatization of public institutions.

The privatization of services is something Alexan wants to see done away with. “Letting private companies get involved in social services never works,” she said. “Look at the US where health care costs are twice as much as here because of the privatization. Quality of service is diminished because they cut corner to maximize profit.”

It is this concept of maximized profit that really makes Alexan mad. “This idea of constant growth, this mantra of maximized profits, it doesn’t work anymore,” she said. “The breakdown of the market should be a wake up call to people that the system is broken. These corporations take all this money and when they fail, they hop in their private jets and go begging for more. They have the gall to not pay taxes and then ask for subsidies.”