Linda Joy McQuaig (born September 1951) is a Canadian journalist, columnist, author and social critic. She worked as a reporter investigating the Patti Starr affair. She wrote books and newspaper columns focusing on corporate influence in economic and social policy. Jonathan Kay of the National Post newspaper described her as "Canada's Michael Moore".

In 2016, her book 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 prior 25 years.

McQuaig was born to a middle-class Toronto family. Her father Jack wrote a half-dozen books on leadership and personal development. Her mother Audrey trained as a psychologist, but gave up her career to raise McQuaig, her sister and brothers.

From 1963 to 1970 McQuaig attended Branksome Hall, a Toronto private girls school where she became president of the debating society, and from which she graduated with the Governor General's Academic Medal. Later she attended the University of Toronto.

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 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 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 a daughter. The marriage ended in 1994.

From the ages of seven to nine, McQuaig wrote and published the one-page DeVere Weekly, named after the street on which her family lived. McQuaig first worked as a journalist while a student at University of Toronto, initially writing and then co-editing with Thomas Walkom the student newspaper The Varsity. In 1974 she was hired as a reporter by The Globe and Mail newspaper. In 1977 she became a story producer for CBC Radio's As It Happens. In 1979 she went to Tehran to freelance for the CBC, The Globe and Mail and Maclean's magazine, covering the aftermath of the Iranian revolution that overthrew the Shah.

In 1983 McQuaig wrote a two-part piece for Maclean's with its then-assistant business editor Ian Austen investigating whether Canadian financier Conrad Black had tried to influence the Attorney General of Ontario inappropriately to stop an investigation into his attempted takeover of Ohio-based Hanna Mining Company. Years later, Black described McQuaig in his Toronto Sun column as a "weedy and not very bright leftist reporter" who writes "sophomoric, soporiferous left-wing books", and told host Peter Gzowski on CBC Radio that McQuaig deserved to be "horsewhipped".

In 1984, McQuaig returned to the Globe as a political reporter, and in 1989 received the tips that uncovered the Patti Starr affair, in which former Ontario Place CEO Patti Starr was found to have illegally used charitable funds to make political donations, and for which McQuaig was awarded a Centre for Investigative Journalism Award and a National Newspaper Award.^{[citation needed]}