Linda Joy McQuaig is a Canadian journalist, columnist, non-fiction author and social critic. She is best known for her series of best-selling books that challenge the dominant free-market economic ideology of recent decades. Her books make the case for a more egalitarian distribution of power, income and wealth. The National Post newspaper has described McQuaig as "Canada's Michael Moore". In October 2016, one of McQuaig's books, Shooting the Hippo: Death by Deficit and other Canadian Myths, was named by the Literary Review of Canada as one of the 25 most influential Canadian books of the past 25 years. Early years and personal life McQuaig was born in September 1951 to a middle-class Toronto family that she has described as opinionated and interested in politics. Her father Jack, who she has called "politically conservative but with a strong sense of social justice", is founder of the McQuaig Institute of Executive Development and has written a half-dozen books on leadership and personal development. McQuaig's mother Audrey was also trained as a psychologist, but gave up her career to raise McQuaig, her sister Wendy and brothers Peter, Don and John. From the ages of seven to nine, McQuaig wrote and published the one-page DeVere Weekly, a newspaper named after the street in Toronto on which her family lived. From 1963 to 1970 McQuaig attended Branksome Hall, a Toronto private girls school where she became president of the debating society and twice led her school to victory at the Ridley invitational debating tournament, and from which she graduated with the Governor General's medal for academic achievement. Later she attended the University of Toronto, where she worked for the student newspaper The Varsity and served as co-editor in chief with Thomas Walkom. McQuaig graduated the University of Toronto in 1974 with a BA, specializing in History and Political Theory. In the 1970s McQuaig and four friends co-owned a house they called The Pit in Toronto's east end, where they hosted frequent house parties and dinners for friends in academia, media and the arts. In 1976 she lived for a year in Paris, where she learned French and wrote a never-published novel. In the mid-eighties McQuaig and two female friends created The Make-Out Game, a boardgame she has described as "a satire on the different ways men and women approach sex." In the early nineties she married criminal defence lawyer Fred Fedorsen, with whom she has