Order of Ontario in the context of "Lieutenant Governor of Ontario"

Jane Isabel Jacobs OC OOnt (née Butzner; 4 May 1916 – 25 April 2006) was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) argued that "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" did not respect the needs of city-dwellers.

Jacobs organized grassroots efforts to protect neighborhoods from urban renewal and slum clearance, in particular plans by Robert Moses to overhaul her own Greenwich Village neighborhood. She was instrumental in the eventual cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have passed directly through the area of Manhattan that would later become known as SoHo, as well as part of Little Italy and Chinatown. She was arrested in 1968 for inciting a crowd at a public hearing on that project. After moving to Toronto in 1968, she joined the opposition to the Spadina Expressway and the associated network of expressways in Toronto that were planned and under construction.

Donovan Bailey OC OOnt (born December 16, 1967) is a Jamaican-Canadian retired sprinter. He once held the world record for the 100 metres. He recorded a time of 9.84 seconds to become Olympic champion in 1996. He was the first Canadian to legally break the 10-second barrier in the 100 m. Particularly noted for his top speed, Bailey ran 12.10 m/s (43.6 km/h; 27.1 mph) in his 1996 Olympic title run, the fastest ever recorded by a human at the time. He was inducted into Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in 2004 as an individual athlete and in 2008 as part of the 1996 Summer Olympics 4 × 100 relay team. In 2005, he was also inducted into the Ontario Sports Hall of Fame.

William Robertson Davies CC OOnt FRSL FRSC (28 August 1913 – 2 December 1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best known and most popular authors and one of its most distinguished "men of letters", a term Davies gladly accepted for himself. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.

Murray George Ross, OC OOnt (April 12, 1910 – July 20, 2000) was a Canadian sociologist, author, and academic administrator. He was the founding president of Toronto's York University and served in that role from 1959 to 1970.

Born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, the son of James Alway Ross and Sarah Agnes Kay, Ross received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and sociology from Acadia University in 1936. He received a Master of Arts degree in sociology from the University of Toronto in 1938. He did post-graduate work in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1939 and in Social psychology from Columbia University in 1949. He received a LL.D. from the University of Toronto in 1971.

Lincoln MacCauley Alexander PC CC OOnt CD QC (January 21, 1922 – October 19, 2012) was a Canadian lawyer and politician who became the first Black Canadian to be a member of Parliament in the House of Commons, a federal Cabinet Minister (as federal Minister of Labour), a Chair of the Worker's Compensation Board of Ontario, and the 24th Lieutenant Governor of Ontario from 1985 to 1991. Alexander was also a governor of the Canadian Unity Council.

Alexander was born in Toronto to Caribbean immigrant parents. After service during World War II, he received a Bachelor of Arts from McMaster University in 1949 before earning his law degree from Osgoode Hall Law School in 1953. A member of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, he became the first black Member of Parliament in Canadian history after being elected to the House of Commons in the 1968 Canadian federal election. He was named Minister of Labour in 1979 under prime minister Joe Clark, holding the position until the PC party's defeat in the 1980 election. He resigned from the House of Commons later that year and became Chair of the Worker's Compensation Board of Ontario.

David Robert Peterson PC OOnt ECO KC (born December 28, 1943) is a Canadian lawyer and former politician who served as the 20th premier of Ontario from 1985 to 1990. He was the first Liberal officeholder in 42 years, ending the so-called Tory dynasty.

Stephen Arthur Cook OC OOnt (born December 14, 1939) is an American-Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who has made significant contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity. He is a university professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics.

He is considered one of the forefathers of computational complexity theory. He won the 1982 ACM Turing Award.

Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. CC OOnt (November 17, 1938 – May 1, 2023) was a Canadian singer-songwriter who achieved worldwide success and helped define the singer-songwriter era of the 1970s. Widely considered one of Canada's greatest songwriters, he had numerous gold and platinum albums, and his songs have been covered by many of the world's most renowned musical artists. Lightfoot's biographer Nicholas Jennings wrote, "His name is synonymous with timeless songs about trains and shipwrecks, rivers and highways, lovers and loneliness."

Lightfoot's songs, including "For Lovin' Me", "Early Morning Rain", "Steel Rail Blues", "Home From The Forest", and "Ribbon of Darkness", a number one hit on the U.S. country chart for Marty Robbins, brought him recognition from the mid-1960s. Chart success with his own recordings began in Canada in 1962 with the No. 3 hit "(Remember Me) I'm the One" and led to a series of major hits at home and abroad throughout the 1970s. He topped the US Hot 100 or Adult Contemporary (AC) chart with "If You Could Read My Mind" (1970), "Sundown" (1974); "Carefree Highway" (1974), "Rainy Day People" (1975), and "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" (1976).

Alice Ann Munro OOnt (/mənˈroʊ/ mən-ROH; née Laidlaw; 10 July 1931 – 13 May 2024) was a Canadian short story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Her work tends to move forward and backward in time, with integrated short story cycles.

Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in a simple but meticulous prose style. Munro received the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for her life's work. She was also a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction, and received the Writers' Trust of Canada's 1996 Marian Engel Award and the 2004 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for Runaway. She stopped writing around 2013 and died at her home in 2024.