Linda McQuaig: Celebrating Indie Media and Activism

rabble readers and listeners and anyone who follows and supports progressive politics in Canada know the work and writing of Linda McQuaig. 

A journalist and best-selling author, McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989 for a series of articles which sparked a public inquiry into the activities of Ontario political lobbyist Patti Starr, and eventually led to Starr's imprisonment. As a Senior Writer for Maclean's magazine, McQuaig (along with business writer Ian Austen) probed the early business dealings of Conrad Black, uncovering how Black used political connections to avoid prosecution. An irate Black suggested on CBC radio that McQuaig should be horsewhipped. In 1991, she was awarded an Atkinson Fellowship for Journalism in Public Policy to study the social welfare systems in Europe and North America. McQuaig has been a rare voice in the mainstream media challenging the prevailing economic and political dogma -- as a columnist in the financial pages of the National Post in the late 1990s, and since 2002, as an op-ed columnist in the Toronto Star.

She has also taken on the status quo in a series of controversial books -- including seven national best-sellers -- such as Shooting the Hippo (short-listed for the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction), The Cult of Impotence and It's the Crude, Dude: War, Big Oil and the Fight for the Planet; The Trouble with Billionaires; and The Wealthy Barber's Wife.

She spoke to guests at rabble.ca's event Celebrating Indie Media and Activism at the Peoples' Social Forum in Ottawa on August 21, 2014.