Linda McQuaig

Linda McQuaig is an author, journalist, and former NDP candidate for Toronto Centre in the Canadian federal election. She is also the author of "The Sport and Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich Are Stealing Canada's Public Wealth" (2019), "War, Big Oil and the Fight for the Planet: It's the Crude, Dude" (2006) and (with Neil Brooks) of "Billionaires’ Ball: Gluttony and Hubris in an Age of Epic Inequality" (2012).
Articles by this author
![]() |
Views Sunday, January 24, 2021 Bare-Knuckle Capitalism has No Place in Nursing Homes When it became clear last fall that the province’s long-term care (LTC) homes were about to be engulfed by the second wave of the pandemic, the Ford government swung into action. Wasting no time, it promptly introduced legislation — legislation that gave the corporate owners of long-term care homes... Read more |
![]() |
Views Sunday, December 27, 2020 Keeping the Curtains Drawn on Canada's Secretive Factory Farm Industry Many people—meat-eaters included—object to the factory farm practice of confining pigs for virtually their entire lives to metal cages so small they can't even turn around. " Factory farms exist in a realm largely beyond public scrutiny or control, with almost nothing to protect the animals from... Read more |
![]() |
Views Tuesday, December 01, 2020 Canada Is Now Paying the Price for Privatizing Its Vaccine Research and Production Lab As the Trudeau government struggles to figure out how to get a coronavirus vaccine to Canadians, one thing is clear: this task would be a lot easier if the Mulroney government hadn’t privatized Connaught Labs three decades ago. The sale of the remarkable Connaught Labs to foreign interests made no... Read more |
![]() |
Views Thursday, November 19, 2020 Long-Term Care Fiasco a Warning About Private Ownership Please put me in a long-term-care home, said nobody ever. Still, few probably expected that these homes would become horror houses of death, taking their place at the very epicentre of a raging pandemic and accounting for some 75 per cent of coronavirus deaths in Ontario. An important aspect of... Read more |
![]() |
Views Saturday, August 22, 2020 NDP Should Use Its Clout to Push Vulnerable Liberals to Take Urgent Climate Action As Bernie Sanders noted: Nero fiddled as Rome burned, while Donald Trump golfs — and Justin Trudeau prorogues Parliament, it could be added. With Canada reeling from the pandemic crisis, our prime minister prorogued Parliament right after he selected Bill Morneau to take the hit for the government’... Read more |
![]() |
Views Sunday, July 05, 2020 How Ottawa is Driving Up the Cost of Infrastructure by Listening to Wall Street The Trudeau government is gearing up to spend billions on new infrastructure as part of its post-pandemic economic plans. What a terrific idea! — except that it plans to do so in a way that will massively, needlessly drive up the costs and allow some of our prime national assets to be owned by... Read more |
![]() |
Views Wednesday, May 20, 2020 Let’s Not Be Duped Again By Deficit Hawks Peddling Austerity Slowly, cautiously, the deficit hawks are daring to come out of the shadows. These are the well-heeled folks, from conservative think-tanks and political circles, who for decades have successfully pushed governments to impose austerity and social spending cuts on the rest of us, in the name of... Read more |
![]() |
Views Thursday, May 07, 2020 Trudeau Should Lift Punishing Sanctions That Harm Vulnerable Nations These days, any national leader not actively urging their citizens to drink disinfectant is managing to look (relatively) good on the world stage. Certainly, compared to the neurotic leadership south of the border, Justin Trudeau has emerged as a steady hand on the tiller, quickly providing... Read more |
![]() |
Views Friday, April 10, 2020 Ottawa Should Produce Vital Products—Like It Did in the Second World War At first glance, the question posed by a Canadian medical ethicist might seem thoughtful: If two coronavirus patients are having serious trouble breathing—and one is a 12-year-old child and the other a 74-year-old doctor—who should get the hospital's only available ventilator? But on further... Read more |
![]() |
Views Saturday, March 14, 2020 The Public Lab That Could Have Helped Fight COVID-19 Pandemic Canada once had a publicly owned pharmaceutical company that could have made a difference in the current coronavirus crisis — except that we sold it. Connaught Labs was a superstar in global medicine. For seven decades, this publicly owned Canadian company performed brilliantly on the national and... Read more |