The Globe and Mail is a nationally distributed Canadian newspaper, based in Toronto and printed in six cities across the country. With a weekly readership of approximately 1 million, it is Canada's largest-circulation national newspaper and second-largest daily newspaper after the Toronto Star. The Globe and Mail is widely described as Canada's English-language newspaper of record.

The predecessor to The Globe and Mail was The Globe, founded in 1844 by Scottish immigrant George Brown, who would later become a Father of Confederation. Brown's liberal politics led him to court the support of the Clear Grits, precursor to the modern Liberal Party of Canada. The Globe began in Toronto as a weekly party organ for Brown's Reform Party, but seeing the economic gains that he could make in the newspaper business, Brown soon targeted a wide audience of liberal minded freeholders. He selected as the motto for the editorial page a quotation from Junius, "The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures." The quotation is carried on the editorial page daily to this day.

Jan Wong (Chinese: 黃明珍; pinyin: Huáng Míngzhēn; born 1952 in Montreal, Quebec) is a Canadian journalist. Wong worked for The Globe and Mail, serving as Beijing correspondent from 1988 to 1994, when she returned to write from Canada. She is the daughter of Montreal businessman Bill Wong, founder of Bill Wong's buffet which was the city's first Chinese restaurant to open outside of Chinatown.

Towards the end of the Cultural Revolution period, she left McGill University and flew to China. The Maoist became one of two foreign college students permitted to study at Beijing University. While at Beijing she denounced a trusting fellow student who had sought her help to escape communist China to the West. The student was subsequently shamed and expelled. "She suffered a lot ... she was sent to the countryside for hard labour. When she came back, she fought hard to clear her name." Long after, Wong takes comfort in having returned from her own escape to the West, and eventually found this person again, learning she had not been her confidante's only betrayer, and that she expressed no anger. Wong wrote another book, and did interviews on her own experience.

Margaret Wente (born 15 February 1950) is a columnist for Canada's largest national daily newspaper, The Globe and Mail and a director of the Energy Probe Research Foundation. She has received the National Newspaper Award for column-writing twice.

Wente was born in Evanston, Illinois and moved to Toronto in 1964, and has since become a naturalized Canadian citizen. She holds a BA in English from the University of Michigan and a MA in English from the University of Toronto. She joined The Globe and Mail in 1986. She has been editor of the paper's business section, the ROB [Report on Business], and managing editor of the paper. Her columns have appeared in the Globe and Mail since 1992, and she has been a full-time columnist for the paper since 1999. She is a frequent commentator on television and radio, and has won numerous journalism awards.

An Accidental Canadian: Reflections on My Home and (Not) Native Land (2004, HarperCollins, ISBN 0-00-200798-3)

Leah McLaren is a Canadian author and newspaper columnist.

Born in Peterborough, Ontario, McLaren attended Claude Watson School for the Arts in Toronto. She studied English literature at McGill University in Montreal, and Trent University in Peterborough, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the latter in 1998. While at Trent she wrote the radio drama Percy and the Pomegranate.

When she was eighteen, McLaren worked as an intern and wrote a feature article for the Canadian monthly This Magazine. After several summers as an intern at The Globe and Mail (the national newspaper at which her mother - Cecily Ross - was an editor at the time) McLaren became an arts reporter, and then the newspaper's London arts correspondent. While in England, her writing was published in several newspapers including The Times, The Evening Standard, and The Sunday Telegraph, as well as in the weekly magazine The Spectator, for which she wrote a controversial and widely read cover story on the romantic failure of the modern English male. In 2008, the CBC shot Abroad, a television movie of the week, written and produced by McLaren and based on her experiences as a young Canadian newspaper reporter living and dating in London. It aired once, on March 14, 2010 and was being developed as a series; until CBC Television axed it before any other episodes were made.

Robert Frederick Zenon "Bob" Geldof, KBE, (born 5 October 1951) is an Irish singer, songwriter, author, occasional actor and political activist. He rose to prominence as the lead singer of the Irish rock band The Boomtown Rats in the late 1970s and early 1980s alongside the punk rock movement. The band had hits with his compositions "Rat Trap" and "I Don't Like Mondays". He co-wrote "Do They Know It's Christmas?", one of the best-selling singles of all time. He starred as Pink in Pink Floyd's 1982 film Pink Floyd The Wall.

Geldof is widely recognised for his activism, especially anti-poverty efforts concerning Africa. In 1984 he and Midge Ure founded the charity supergroup Band Aid to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. They went on to organise the charity super-concert Live Aid the following year and the Live 8 concerts in 2005. Geldof currently serves as an adviser to the ONE Campaign, founded by fellow Irish humanitarian Bono. A single father, Geldof has also been outspoken for the fathers' rights movement. Geldof has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, was granted an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II, and is a recipient of the Man of Peace title which recognises individuals who have made "an outstanding contribution to international social justice and peace", among numerous other awards and nominations.