[6][7] 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.

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."

[12][13] In 2004, Quaig said that Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chavez had redirected “vast sums of national wealth to the swollen ranks of Venezuela’s poor,” and in 2013 she mourned his death, calling it a “sad milestone.”[14] Since 1992 McQuaig has written an op-ed column in the Toronto Star and has supported herself through a combination of freelance writing, speaking engagements and royalties from her books.

In her first book, Behind Closed Doors (1987), she opines that members of the financial elite maintained and extended control over the country's tax policy, to their own benefit.

[citation needed] Her 1993 book The Wealthy Banker's Wife compared the social welfare systems of Europe with those of the United States, and suggested that Canada was veering towards the US model.

[citation needed] The Cult of Impotence (1998) disputed the notion that countries had no alternative but to submit to corporate demands for deep tax cuts and reduced social spending—or wealth-holders would move their capital offshore.

[citation needed] In All You Can Eat (2001), McQuaig looked at how the new international financial rules and trade deals were in her view ensconcing a radical form of capitalism, leading to deep inequality and the disempowerment of the people.

Drawing on the work of economic historian and anthropologist Karl Polanyi, McQuaig argued that the new capitalism was not part of a natural evolution but rather a deliberately imposed redesign of society at odds with the basic human need for community.

[citation needed] McQuaig's newspaper columns[21] focus on issues like the importance of maintaining a strong social safety net, and on what she argues are the detrimental effects of privatization, trade and globalization, and the influence of money in politics.