Léo-Paul Lauzon (born November 27, 1946) is an author, researcher, accountant, professor, and social activist in Quebec. He is best known for his work in seeking corporate social accountability.
Early life and education
Lauzon was raised in a low-income household in Montreal. His father abandoned the family in the late 1950s, when Lauzon was twelve, and he was forced to work as a delivery boy for a pharmaceutical company to support his mother and two sisters. Lauzon has said that the poverty of his early years helped him develop a strong social conscience, adding that he "didn't have the time or the luxury of being a political revolutionary" while attending school.
He is a chartered accountant, having placed first among all students in Quebec's 1970 examination. He also finished first among 1,778 candidates in Canada's 1974 certified management accountancy examination. This has not prevented him from criticizing his profession; in 1991, he said that "accounting is closer to the occult sciences than to exact mathematics." He has called for accounting students to be given a more humanistic learning approach, with the intent of creating independent thinkers who are effective at creating social change.
Lauzon has a Master of Business Administration degree from the Hautes Études Commerciales of Montreal and a Ph.D. in management sciences from the University of Grenoble in France. He joined the accounting sciences department of the Université du Québec à Montréal in 1973 and founded the university's chair of socio-economic sciences in 2006.
Social accounting
Lauzon published a book entitled Social Accounting in 1974, promoting a system of evaluating companies in terms of social responsibility. Since then, Lauzon examined several companies in areas such as environmental protection, human relations, equal opportunities and consumer interests, making extensive use of corporate annual reports.
In a 1989 interview, he said, "Being an accountant is an excellent training to criticize big business. I know how corporate executives think because I have the same mentality myself. The only difference is that I have a social conscience and most of them don't." He added that he was "blacklisted in many business circles" and said that some of his colleagues were afraid to work with him because of his reputation. Later in the same year, however, Lauzon said that his research was gaining mainstream acceptance and that Le Journal de Montréal and the Quebec Management Accounting Association were funding some of his work.
Lauzon has said that he is not anti-capitalist and supports private enterprise. He describes himself as a social democrat.
Studies of corporate culture
Francophones in Quebec business
Lauzon released a report in 1986 that showed strong disparities between Quebec businesses as regards the number of francophones in key decision-making positions: most "decision makers" in some companies were francophone, while in others they represented less than ten per cent of the total. The study has been interpreted as showing the rise of a new francophone business culture in Quebec, rather than francophone integration into traditionally dominant anglophone companies.
Women in business
In 1987, Lauzon oversaw a study indicating that less than three per cent of top management jobs in Canadian companies were held by women, despite the fact that more women were entering the workforce. At the time of the report's release, he said, "If you listen to representatives of the private sector, then we're in the best possible world, and women hold important positions. [...] This research is based on facts that show clearly that reality is very different." He added that there was no valid reason for the numbers to be so low and that private sector firms were afraid of change in this field.
Follow-up studies found that female representation in top management had increased to only 6.7% in 1990 and 7.2% in 1992. Lauzon noted that even these increases were misleading, in that some female executives held positions that were created solely to give a misleading impression of gender integration.
Securities commissions
Lauzon criticized the securities commissions of Ontario and Quebec in 1989, saying that they were well-intentioned but largely ineffective and overly dependent on "self-serving" regulations developed by the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants.