Journalist and best-selling author known for challenging the Establishment and championing the powerless.

For more than two decades, Linda McQuaig has been a rare voice within the mainstream media challenging the prevailing economic and political dogma. As a columnist for the Toronto Star and the author of seven national bestsellers, McQuaig has stirred controversy with her relentless exposure of uncomfortable facts and her willingness to take on some of the most powerful members of the Canadian elite. An enraged Conrad Black - whose early business practices came under McQuaig's scrutiny in two cover stories in Maclean's Magazine - famously called for her to be "horsewhipped."

As a national reporter for the Globe and Mail in the 1980s, McQuaig wrote about how Canada's financial elite managed to shape the nation's tax policies to their own benefit. She exposed the fact that hundreds of well-to-do Canadians were paying no income taxes at all - a revelation that was instrumental in pushing the Mulroney government to introduce the Alternative Minimum Income Tax. She also stirred controversy with a series of front-page articles during the 1988 federal election about the government's quiet plans for a far-reaching new sales tax aimed at collecting billions of dollars in extra revenue - a charge that was vehemently denied. But shortly after its re-election, the Mulroney government unveiled plans for just such a tax, to be called the GST. McQuaig's grasp of the politics that shaped the tax system led her to write her first book, Behind Closed Doors: How the Rich Won Control of Canada's Tax System -- And Ended Up Richer, published by Penguin Books in 1987.

In 1988, after months digging into the activities of Ontario political lobbyist Patti Starr, McQuaig broke the story that Starr was directing charitable funds into the party coffers of the David Peterson's Liberal government. That led to the establishment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Patti Starr affair -- and eventually to the imprisonment of Patti Starr. For her work on the Patti Starr story, McQuaig won both a National Newspaper Award and a Centre for Investigative Journalism award in 1989.

In 1991, McQuaig was awarded an Atkinson Fellowship for Journalism in Public Policy to study the social welfare systems in Europe and North America. After traveling to Scandinavia and the United States, she wrote a series of articles in the Toronto Star, which argued that Canada was foolishly veering away from the generous European model of social welfare and towards the tightfisted American one. She later developed the articles into a book called The Wealthy Banker's Wife: the Assault on Equality in Canada, which became a Number One bestseller in Canada.

McQuaig followed up with Shooting the Hippo: Death by Deficit and Other Canadian Myths. Published in 1995 at the height of deficit hysteria in Canada, Shooting the Hippo challenged the conventional wisdom about the deficit, insisting that the deficit was not caused by government overspending. Rather McQuaig showed that the deficit was caused by the recession, which had been brought on by the Mulroney government's policy of using high interest rates to reduce inflation. Shooting the Hippo shot up to the top of the Globe and Mail National Bestseller list and remained on the list for six months. The book was also short-listed for the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction.

Among her recent books is Holding the Bully's Coat, which examines Canada's abandonment of peacekeeping and misguided involvement in the U.S. "war on terror." McQuaig is also author of the controversial bestseller It's the Crude, Dude: War, Big Oil and the Fight for the Planet, which was described by Noam Chomsky as "an urgent wake-up call - a perceptive inquiry into the world's energy system."

Since 2002, McQuaig has written a political column in the Toronto Star, using the column to challenge the economic and political orthodoxies of Canada's elite.

The National Post once described Linda McQuaig as "Canada's Michael Moore." The Post meant it as an insult. But many Canadians would regard the comparison as a compliment - and a fitting description for a writer who has consistently exposed the greed and malfeasance of powerful members of the Establishment, and who has used her journalistic skills to provide a voice for those who don't have one.

• Inequality and the Economic Crisis
• Reviving the Notion of the Common Good
• Oil in an Age of Scarcity and Global Warming
• Canada's Transformation on the World Stage

Praise for It's the Crude Dude

"McQuaiq's perceptive inquiry into the world's energy system… is an urgent wake-up call."
-Noam Chomsky

"Rivals Naomi Klein's No Logo… for changing the way we live now."
- The Globe and Mail

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