High-voltage. That’s how Montreal’s high-brow daily Le Devoir described Monique Simard shortly after she was appointed head of French-language production at the National Film Board last summer.

The adjective fits the former private-sector producer, union leader and Parti Québécois MNA, who is part of a generation of alpha boomer women that includes producer Denise Robert (Les invasions barbares) and writer/producer Fabienne Larouche (Les Bougon, Virginie) who have risen to prominence in Quebec’s thriving film and television industry.

But what makes Simard’s career path distinctive is its breadth: at age 33, she was vice-president of one of the province’s most powerful labor organizations, the Confederation of National Trade Unions, where she was known as ‘La Passionaria’ of Quebec labor. In 1991, she started a new career as a TV current affairs show host. And in 1995, as president of the PQ, Simard was a vocal campaigner for the ‘Yes’ side during the Quebec referendum on independence. Elected to represent the Montreal South Shore riding of La Prairie for the PQ in 1996, she left politics in 1998.

Ironically, now she works for the federal government and is technically paid from the Queen’s purse.

Sitting in her office at the NFB’s headquarters in the Montreal suburb of Ville-Saint Laurent, Simard takes a moment to reflect on what drives her.

‘I want to change society,’ she says. ‘My time in the union movement was very exciting. We were having an impact on people’s lives – especially women,’ says the mother of two, who negotiated for pay equity and paid maternity leave while at the CNTU. ‘I want to make films that will make a difference.’

Head of social-issue doc house Productions Virage for the past decade, Simard has produced over 15 documentaries, including La femme qui ne se voyait plus aller (The Woman Who Lost Herself), a portrait of another successful Quebec producer, the late Micheline Charest, the Cinar founder who fell from grace amid allegations that her company made millions by making a range of false claims – including substituting Canadian names for American scriptwriters – in order to collect Cancon tax rebates.

A woman who appears to thrive on shaking things up, Simard has radically altered the NFB’s French Program since her arrival. In the name of ‘putting more money on the screen,’ she eliminated two producer jobs and reinstated the filmmaker-in-residence program.

When Simard initially made the changes, she told Playback they would free up roughly 20% of the Quebec studio’s $5-million production budget for filmmaking. But she declined to confirm those budget figures for this profile, saying only that the cuts would free up more money for filmmaking.

Simard says she also made the cuts because the French Program had been rudderless for the past few years, adding, ‘There was no coherence in its direction. Decisions were being made in an ad hoc fashion.’

Like her boss, NFB chairman Tom Perlmutter, Simard believes the future of documentary is the Internet. Recently she initiated a new web-based project on the current economic downturn, which will go online in April, an extraordinarily fast turnaround for an institution that is frequently criticized for being out-of-step because it takes too long to complete projects.

‘The economic situation is having an impact on everyone. We have to take to the streets and start filming people who are affected. And we have to do it fast,’ she says.

Simard is particularly enthusiastic about the interactive potential of the web. ‘It allows for a dialogue with the subjects and the public… and this can result in social change,’ says the producer, who points to Fernand Dansereau’s 1968 NFB classic Saint-Jérôme as an example of the type of film the board should be making. An activist film, Saint-Jérôme explored the impact of technological change on a small industrial town north of Montreal and was produced with the participation of the townspeople.

Simard disputes the theory that the government has been slowly trying to kill the NFB since it slashed the institution’s budget in the mid-1990s.

‘I don’t think it’s dying. We have less resources, but we still have resources. We are still in a privileged position,’ Simard insists.

She also shrugs off the notion that the NFB is irrelevant to mainstream Canadians, calling the organization ‘indispensable.’

‘We believe in social justice. We are an alternative to mainstream media,’ she says, adding that the NFB needs to do a better job of marketing its brand. ‘There was so much buzz around Richard Desjardin’s Le peuple invisible, but no one knew it was an NFB film,’ she says, referring to the popular Quebec singer’s recent Prix Jutra-winning documentary about Quebec’s Algonquin people, which made headlines across the province.

Simard also doesn’t see any conflict between her nationalist politics and a job in a federally funded institution. ‘I feel completely at ease. This is a free and independent institution. It’s not a propaganda machine,’ she says.