Stevie Cameron

Early Life and Family

Stephanie Graham Dahl — known as Stevie since childhood — was the daughter of Harold Edward “Whitey” Dahl, an American bush pilot and mercenary who had volunteered to fight with the Spanish Republican Air Force during the Spanish Civil War. Her mother was Eleanor Bone, daughter of a well-to-do Belleville, Ontario, family with Loyalist roots.

Cameron’s parents met when her father was training pilots for the Royal Canadian Air Force in Trenton, Ontario, during the Second World War. She had two brothers. Her father was an adventurer who was occasionally involved in mysterious jobs as a pilot. The family accompanied Harold Dahl wherever he worked around the globe. As Cameron recollected later in life, her father would often disappear, and her mother would move her and her brothers back to Canada.

Her parents finally separated after her father was arrested in Paris, along with his mistress, on suspicion of stealing gold from a plane he had piloted in 1954. Stevie Cameron would never see her father again. He died in a plane crash during bad weather near Fort Chimo (now Kuujjuaq), Quebec in 1956. At the time, he was ferrying equipment for the construction of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line radar stations.

Education

Stevie Cameron completed high school in Belleville. She then earned a BA in English from the University of British Columbia. She briefly worked as a junior code breaker for the Communications Branch of the National Research Council (now the Communications Security Establishment), where she monitored air traffic in the Soviet Union.

After she married political scientist David Cameron, the couple moved to the United Kingdom. Stevie Cameron continued her education, studying English literature at University College London. The couple returned to Canada and initially settled on a farm outside Peterborough, where they both taught at Trent University. Cameron also studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. When her lecturing contract at Trent wasn’t renewed, she decided to dedicate herself to journalism.

Career Highlights

Stevie Cameron started her career writing for Homemakers magazine. She became food editor for the Toronto Star in 1979. She then moved to the Ottawa Journal as its lifestyle editor. When that paper shuttered, she moved to the Ottawa Citizen. It was while working at the Citizen that Cameron took an interest in political journalism.

She wrote about a slew of patronage appointments made by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the waning days of his last administration. Cameron then worked at the Globe and Mail from 1986 to 1990 and hosted the CBC’s The Fifth Estate in 1990–91. She was also a contributing editor with Maclean’s from 1993 to 2001. In 1996, she became the editor-in-chief of Elm Street, which was described as “an intelligent women’s magazine.”

Published Works

Stevie Cameron authored several non-fiction books during her career. They focused on two broad topics: alleged corruption during the administration of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and the police investigations into serial killer Robert Pickton.

Published in 1989, Cameron’s first book was Ottawa Inside Out: Power, Prestige and Scandal in the Nation’s Capital. It provided a window into life in the nation’s capital from the perspective of a political reporter. It also detailed some of the scandals of the Mulroney government.

Cameron expanded on this in On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years (1994). It dove deeper into those scandals, as well as allegations of corruption, greed and influence peddling during Mulroney’s two terms in office. Within the pages of On the Take, Cameron further probed the details of what would become known as the Airbus Affair, as well as the mysterious death of Mulroney’s tax lawyer, Bruce Verchere. Cameron expanded on these last two items in two book-length investigative reports: The Last Amigo: Karlheinz Schreiber and the Anatomy of a Scandal (2001), and Blue Trust: The Author, the Lawyer, His Wife and Her Money (1998).

Cameron also wrote two books on serial killer Robert Pickton: The Pickton File (2007) and On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing Women (2011).

RCMP Informant Allegation

Defenders of former prime minister Brian Mulroney, including lawyer William Kaplan, alleged in 2003 that Stevie Cameron had worked as an RCMP informant, seemingly in retribution for her dogged reporting on Mulroney and his involvement in the Airbus Affair. These allegations were published by Cameron’s former employer, the Globe and Mail. They were not substantiated. Though the RCMP had assigned Cameron a code number and several officers were told to consider her an informant, the only information Cameron provided had already been published or was common knowledge. She herself denied ever being an informant and did not consider herself to be one, though she had at one point traded information with police sources. When it was ultimately revealed that Mulroney had in fact received cash payments in the Airbus Affair, Cameron was vindicated.

Philanthropy

As a church elder at St. Andrew’s Church in Toronto in 1991, Stevie Cameron proposed her church work with others in the city’s Out of the Cold program. The program helped unhoused people take shelter in churches. Thanks to Cameron’s leadership, St. Andrew’s opened its doors to the unhoused, accommodating about 100 people and serving a hot meal to double that number. Cameron was also involved in raising funds for the program, recruiting volunteers and preparing meals.

Cameron continued working with Out of the Cold for 17 years. She also sat on the board of directors of Second Harvest, a charity that rescues surplus food and gives it to the needy.

Awards

Stevie Cameron received an honorary doctorate from the Vancouver School of Theology in 2004. In 2008, she was named the Irving Chair in Journalism at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick.

In 2011, On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing Women was nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. It also won an Arthur Ellis Award. (See also Literary Prizes in English.)

Cameron was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 2012. She was recognized for her investigative journalism as much as for her humanitarian efforts to help the homeless. She also received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal that same year.