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Here are the participants in today's GlobeSalon

Michael Adams is the president of the Environics group of research and communications consulting companies which he co-founded in 1970. He is the author of four Canadian best sellers: Sex in the Snow: Canadian Social Values at the End of the Millennium, Better Happy Than Rich? Canadians, Money and the Meaning of Life, Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values, and American Backlash: The Untold Story of Social Change in the United States. His current book entitled Unlikely Utopia: The Surprising Triumph of Canadian Pluralism, focuses on the promise and challenge of Canadian multiculturalism.

David Beers is an award-winning writer and founding editor of The Tyee , one of Canada's leading independent online sources of news and views. He has been a senior editor at Mother Jones and The Vancouver Sun where he edited the "Fate of the Strait" environmental series, winner of Canada's National Newspaper Award. With a strong interest in sustainability issues and solutions-oriented journalism, he is a lecturer at the UBC School of Journalism, and former vice chair of the Vancouver City Planning Commission.

Journalist Lorna Dueck is Executive Producer of Listen Up TV , a newsmagazine examining spiritual themes in news and current events, aired on nine networks worldwide. She works extensively in Canada's non-profit and charitable sector, including Samaritan's Purse, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Toronto City Mission, Feed The Hungry, and Greater Europe Mission. She is completing a Bachelor of Religious Education degree from Tyndale University College, and holds an Honorary Doctorate in Christian Ministry from Trinity Western University. She is a recipient of several leadership and journalism awards.

Brian Flemming is a Halifax-based international lawyer, writer and public policy adviser. He is a former senior aide to Prime Minister Trudeau. During the past 14 years, he was a weekly columnist for a Halifax daily newspaper, writing on politics and public policy issues. His columns have been carried in every major Canadian newspaper. In the public sector, Flemming has been the head of several Crown corporations, federal panels and agencies. From 2005 to 2007, he was a founding member of the federal Advisory Council on National Security. He is a QC and a Member of the Order of Canada.

Camilla Gibb is the author of three internationally acclaimed novels, including Mouthing the Words (winner of the City of Toronto Book Award), and Sweetness in the Belly (shortlisted for the Giller Prize and winner of the Trillium Award). She has served as Writer-in-Residence at the Universities of Alberta and Toronto, and is currently an adjunct faculty member with the University of Toronto's MA in Creative Writing Program. She holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Oxford University.

Marcus Gee is a Globe reporter and columnist covering the Asia-Pacific region. Born in Toronto, he graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1979 with a degree in modern European history, then worked as a reporter for The Province, Vancouver's morning newspaper. He spent four years in Asia in the early 1980s, the first three in Hong Kong as an editor, writer and correspondent for Asiaweek magazine, the last as a reporter for United Press International in Manila and Sydney. He joined the Globe in 1991 as an editorial writer and has won two National Newspaper Awards for his commentary.

Natasha Hassan is Comment Editor of The Globe and Mail. She joined The Globe in early 2005 as bureaus editor for the Report on Business, where she was responsible for the business section's national and international news coverage. Ms. Hassan came to The Globe from The National Post where she held numerous positions, most notably Comment Editor from the paper's inception in 1998 till 2004. She was also a senior editor and editorial writer with the former Financial Post before the launch of the National Post. Prior to her career in journalism, Ms. Hassan worked as research co-ordinator for the Centre for International Studies.

Michael W. Higgins is President of St. Thomas University in Fredericton and past president of St. Jerome's University in the University of Waterloo. He is also the author and co-author of numerous books including: Thomas Merton: Pilgrim in Process; Women and the Church: A Sourcebook; Portraits of Canadian Catholicism; My Father's Business: the Biography of Gerald Emmett Cardinal Carter; The Jesuit Mystique; Heretic Blood: the Spiritual Geography of Thomas Merton; The Muted Voice: Religion and the Media; and Stalking the Holy: In Pursuit of Saint-Making.

William Johnson was a Jesuit for 10 years, taught sociology at the University of Manitoba and the University of Toronto, spent 20 years with The Globe and Mail as reporter and columnist and nine years with The Montreal Gazette as national affairs columnist. He attended Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, Loyola College, Regis College, the Université de Montréal, the University of Toronto and the University of California at Berkeley, specializing in philosophy, French literature and sociology. His books include Anglophobie made in Québec, A Canadian Myth, Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada, and a translation of Young Trudeau, 1919-1944. He won the National Newspaper Award and is a member of the Order of Canada.

Mark Kingwell is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine. He is the author of 11 books of political and cultural theory, including the national bestsellers Better Living (1998), The World We Want (2000), and Concrete Reveries (2008). Mr. Kingwell is the winner of the Spitz Prize in political theory as well as National Magazine Awards for both columns and essays.

  Antonia Maioni is Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, Associate Professor of Political Science and William Dawson Scholar at McGill University in Montreal. She is a graduate of Université Laval, the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, and Northwestern University. Her research interests focus on health and social policy in Canada and the U.S. She is a frequent media commentator on Canadian politics and public policy, in both English and French, and lives in a bilingual household with her spouse, Pierre Martin, and their three young sons.

Gwyn Morgan is a nationally known business leader who devoted three decades to building Canada's largest energy company — EnCana, with an enterprise value of approximately $50 billion. He stepped down as founding CEO at the end of 2005. Gwyn has been recognized as Canada's Outstanding CEO of the Year and also as Canada's Most Respected CEO. He has a strong belief that a corporation should be a positive social, community and environmental force. He is a Trustee of the Fraser Institute, the Manning Centre for Democracy and the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education.

Clifford Orwin is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Fellow of St. Michael's College and of the Centre for International Studies, and Distinguished Visiting Fellow and Member of the Task Force on the Virtues of a Free Society at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Born and raised in Chicago and educated at Cornell and Harvard, he has spent his entire academic career at Toronto with the exception of visiting appointments in the U.S., France, Portugal, and Israel. After eight years of writing a monthly or so column for The National Post, he moved to The Globe in 2006.

Prof. John Polanyi , educated at Manchester University, England, was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and at the National Research Council of Canada. He is a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto, a member of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada (P.C.), and a Companion of the Order of Canada (C.C.). His awards include the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of London. He has written extensively on science policy, the control of armaments, peacekeeping and human rights. He lives in Toronto with his wife Brenda Bury .

Norman Spector, a former chief of staff to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, is also a former academic, federal and provincial deputy minister, ambassador and newspaper publisher. He's been writing in The Globe and Mail since 1995 and in Le Devoir since 2003. For the past three years, Norman has been providing a daily review of the Canadian and international press on his website Norman's Spectator His book, Chronicle of a War Foretold: How Mideast Peace Became America's Fight, was published by Douglas and McIntyre in 2003. The following year, he contributed an afterword to William Kaplan's A Secret Trial, published by McGill-Queen's University Press.

Jim Stanford is an Economist with the Canadian Auto Workers, Canada's largest private-sector trade union. He received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1995 from the New School for Social Research in New York, and also holds economics degrees from Cambridge University and the University of Calgary. Jim is the author of Paper Boom (published in 1999) and Economics for Everyone (Pluto Press and Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2008). In 2007 he was appointed vice-chair of the Ontario Manufacturing Council. Jim writes a regular economics column for The Globe and Mail. He lives in Toronto with his partner and two daughters.

Globe columnist Margaret Wente is a past winner of the National Newspaper Award for column-writing. She has had a diverse career in Canadian journalism as both a writer and an editor. She has edited two leading business magazines, Canadian Business and ROB Magazine. She has also been editor of The Globe's business section, the Report on Business, and managing editor of the paper. Her columns have appeared in the Globe since 1992. Ms. Wente was born in Chicago and moved to Toronto with her family when she was in her teens. She has won numerous journalism awards. She holds a BA from the University of Michigan, and an MA in English from the University of Toronto.

The following people are members of The Globe Salon who are not participating in today's discussion but who will be doing so in future instalments.

John Duffy is one of Canada's leading government relations and public affairs consultants, serving a wide range of ROB 500 corporations in Toronto and Ottawa. He has been actively involved in Liberal Party politics, both federally and in Ontario, for more than 20 years. He has served for two decades as a volunteer adviser to former prime minister Paul Martin, playing senior policy and strategy roles. Mr. Duffy has also served as a strategic consultant on the last several Ontario Liberal election campaigns. He is the author of Fights of Our Lives: Elections, Leadership and the Making of Canada, a bestselling examination of Canada's five pivotal federal elections.

Joseph Facal was born in Uruguay and arrived in Canada in 1970. He is currently associate professor at HEC Montréal, which is the business school of the Université de Montréal, where he teaches sociology and management. He writes a weekly column for the daily newspaper Le Journal de Montréal and is a regular TV and radio commentator on public affairs. From 1994 to 2003, he was an elected member (PQ) of the Quebec National Assembly and also served in several cabinet posts in the governments of Lucien Bouchard and Bernard Landry. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). He has also written three books.

Lysiane Gagnon is a columnist for La Presse. She also writes a weekly column for The Globe and Mail.

Naomi Klein is the award-winning author of the international bestseller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Translated into 28 languages and with more than a million copies in print, The New York Times called No Logo "a movement bible." She writes an internationally syndicated column for The Nation magazine and The Guardian newspaper. Her articles have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and The New York Times. She is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of King's College, Nova Scotia. Her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, was published worldwide in September, 2007.

Margaret MacMillan is the Warden of St. Antony's College, a Professor of International History at the University of Oxford, and a Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Her books include Women of the Raj (1988, 2007); Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (2002); and Nixon in China: Six Days that Changed the World. Her most recent book is The Uses and Abuses of History. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Irshad Manji directs the Moral Courage Project at New York University. She is the best-selling author of The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith, now translated into almost 30 languages. Irshad is also been a presenter of the Gemini-nominated documentary, Faith Without Fear. The World Economic Forum has selected Irshad as a Young Global Leader. Maclean's magazine has her on its Honour Roll of "Canadians Who Make a Difference." And The Jakarta Post in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, identifies Irshad one of three women creating positive change in Islam today. Her official website is www.irshadmanji.com