Investigative journalist Stevie Cameron, pictured in 2012, was a noted social activist and feminist who gained the loyalty and admiration of fellow journalists and a wide circle of friends.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
When investigative reporter Stevie Cameron published On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years in 1994, the book was an instant bestseller. It turned its author into a national media star, a controversial figure in her own right, and Brian Mulroney’s nemesis.
Ms. Cameron, who died on Aug. 31 at the age of 80 at her home in Toronto after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease and dementia, was not just a political journalist, but also a food writer, author of six books, social activist and feminist who gained the loyalty and admiration of fellow journalists and a wide circle of friends.
“She was a pioneer in investigative journalism in Canada,” said Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations and former Ontario premier, a friend of Ms. Cameron for decades. “She was hugely courageous and fearless.”
Ms. Cameron’s book appeared not long after the Progressive Conservative Party was virtually wiped out in the 1993 election. The defeat was seen as a personal rejection of Mr. Mulroney after his nine years as prime minister. On the Take was a compendium of allegations of venality and corruption, both grand and petty, during the Mulroney era.
In a review in The Globe and Mail, Clark Davey, the newspaper’s former managing editor, called it a “remarkable and valuable book.” Columnist Allan Fotheringham crowned Ms. Cameron as “just possibly the finest investigative journalist in the land.”
Yet Ms. Cameron also had her detractors, who said her allegations too often came from anonymous sources and were not sufficiently supported by facts. And there were concerns among some journalists that she was too close to the police after it emerged years later that the RCMP considered her a confidential informant while she was investigating alleged kickbacks involving Mr. Mulroney concerning the sale of Airbus aircraft to Air Canada when it was still a Crown corporation. (Those allegations against Mr. Mulroney were never proved and the RCMP dropped its investigation.)
Her critics, above all allies of Mr. Mulroney, were passionate in their disdain for Ms. Cameron. Toronto Sun columnist Douglas Fisher called the book “trash” while newspaper publisher Conrad Black accused Ms. Cameron of harbouring “a pathological hatred of Mulroney,” calling On the Take “an absurd and defamatory book.”
Ms. Cameron, author of On The Take, a book on the Mulroney Airbus affair, appears at the Commons Ethics committee looking into the Schreiber-Mulroney affair, in Ottawa, on Feb. 14, 2008.Tom Hanson/The Canadian Press
Mr. Mulroney himself said nothing publicly about Ms. Cameron, but he fumed privately, according to the late political journalist Peter C. Newman. In Mr. Newman’s 2005 book The Secret Mulroney Tapes, featuring excerpts from years of private phone conversations between the two men, Mr. Mulroney heaped insults on Ms. Cameron. He also complained about her promotional book tour for On the Take, saying she was “trying to whip up interest in a book that implies that the prime minister is a thug and a crook and a killer.”
Ms. Cameron denied that her work was politically biased, describing herself as “a run-of-the-mill, equal-opportunity offender, not anti-Tory, just anti-sleaze.”
Yet despite the tough veneer, Ms. Cameron also admitted that waves of criticism from her enemies sometimes got to her. “I’m just the kid from high school who wants everyone to like her,” she told one interviewer.
Ms. Cameron’s most difficult professional moment came in 2003 with the publication of a series of articles in The Globe and Mail by William Kaplan, a Toronto lawyer, who looked into the corruption allegations against Mr. Mulroney. Although the articles disclosed that Mr. Mulroney had accepted $300,000 in cash from Airbus lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber, seeming to corroborate at least part of Ms. Cameron’s portrait of the former prime minister, they also contained a bombshell allegation against Ms. Cameron herself. (Mr. Mulroney later said he was paid $225,000 by Mr. Schreiber.)
Mr. Kaplan said that the RCMP had for years considered Ms. Cameron a confidential informant after she shared information with them concerning allegations about Airbus and other government procurement contracts. She had even been allocated an informant number by the RCMP. Ms. Cameron’s role was later acknowledged publicly by the RCMP in a related court case.
The reaction was harsh. The Canadian Association of Journalists denounced Ms. Cameron, warning that becoming “proxy agents for the state can besmirch the whole journalistic profession.” After supporters in the media came to her defence, the CAJ issued a partial apology.
After initially denying that she could have been considered an informant, she later acknowledged that the RCMP had been referring to her as an informant. But she insisted that the police had given her that designation erroneously and without her knowledge. Furthermore, she wasn’t paid for her role, she said.
In any case, she had only swapped “pathetic scraps of information” and publicly available material with the police, something she claimed that other colleagues routinely do. “I was a reporter trying to get a story, one of many reporters interviewed by the RCMP. I was blissfully ignorant. I can’t tell you how many times I wished I hadn’t talked to them.”
David Cameron, Ms. Cameron’s husband, said that the allegations hurt his wife deeply. “She was just mortified that she would be charged with this because of her deep commitment to journalism.” He called the allegations against her “a hatchet job.”
Always known as Stevie, she was born Stephanie Graham Dahl on Oct. 11, 1943, in Belleville, Ont., the second of three children of Harold Edward (Whitey) Dahl, an American pilot and soldier of fortune, and his wife, Eleanor Bone, daughter of a well-to-do local family with Loyalist and Scottish roots.
Her father fought on the Republican side as a pilot during the Spanish Civil War and moved to Canada after the outbreak of the Second World War to train pilots for the RCAF at Trenton, Ont. He continued his adventures after the war, getting involved in questionable business ventures and mysterious flying jobs in Hollywood, Caracas and Zurich and often dragging his wife and three children along with him.
“Again and again, when Whitey would suddenly disappear, she’d dress her children in the middle of the night, leave everything she owned behind and make a run for Canada,” Ms. Cameron recalled in a Lives Lived column after her mother’s death in 1997.
Eleanor finally separated from Whitey after he was arrested in Paris along with his mistress, suspected of gold smuggling. “We never saw him again,” Ms. Cameron recalled. Whitey Dahl died three years later, in 1956, in a plane crash. Stevie was 13.
After completing high school in Belleville, Ms. Cameron attended the University of British Columbia, earning a BA in English. She worked briefly in Ottawa as a junior code breaker for what’s now known as Communications Security Establishment, tracking air traffic in the Soviet Union. She later moved to the U.K. with her husband, the political scientist David Cameron, and pursued graduate studies in English literature at University College London but didn’t complete her degree.
Returning to Canada, the couple initially settled on a farm outside Peterborough, Ont., while both taught at Trent University. After Ms. Cameron was dropped as a sessional lecturer, she began feature writing, initially for Homemakers magazine. She was appointed food editor at the Toronto Star in 1979, where she benefited from earlier culinary training at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.
By then, the couple had two children and were based in Ottawa, making her commute to Toronto difficult, so Ms. Cameron moved to the Ottawa Journal as lifestyles editor and when that paper closed, switched to the Ottawa Citizen.
It was at the Citizen that she got the bug for political journalism, including a piece excoriating Pierre Trudeau for a raft of patronage appointments he made just before stepping down as prime minister. She later moved to The Globe and Mail, then hosted CBC’s The Fifth Estate and was contributing editor to Maclean’s magazine.
“She was incredibly dogged when chasing stories,” said Graham Fraser, who was Ottawa bureau chief of The Globe and Mail in the late 1980s, when Ms. Cameron was a reporter at the newspaper. “When she got her teeth into a story she would become very passionate.”
In 1996, she became founding editor of Elm Street magazine, which billed itself as “an intelligent women’s magazine.” She left in 1999 and the magazine folded in 2004.
Ms. Cameron, who wrote about serial killer Robert Willie Pickton and his victims in On the Farm, talked to the Globe and Mail about the release of Commissioner Wally Oppal's final report, on Dec. 14, 2012.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Ms. Cameron later spent years covering the trial of British Columbia serial killer Robert Pickton, writing two books about the case. Asked about the switch from political writing to crime reporting, she said, “It was actually a simple move for me because I was sick of politicians.” She added, with her typically sharp wit, “Serial killers don’t sue you.”
Beyond her professional work, Ms. Cameron had a strong sense of social responsibility. Nothing demonstrated that more than her involvement in Out of the Cold, which provides food and shelter to homeless people in downtown Toronto.
Cameron Brett was minister at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, in Toronto’s business district, where Ms. Cameron was an elder. In the frigid winter of 1991, the city was confronted with an explosion of homelessness. “They were sleeping in the churchyard and on the church steps,” recalled Mr. Brett, who is now retired.
Ms. Cameron proposed that St. Andrew’s join other downtown churches that were already participating in Out of the Cold. Eventually, as many as 200 people went to St. Andrew’s every Monday evening for a hot meal and 100 of them stayed in the church hall overnight.
“She was the prime mover for the whole program [at St. Andrew’s],” Mr. Brett said, raising money, recruiting volunteers and overseeing preparation of the meals, using her cooking skills to make sure that what was served “was not your typical soup-kitchen menu.” Ms. Cameron worked with Out of the Cold for 17 years.
Beyond her books and years of newspaper and magazine articles, she is also remembered for a column she wrote in the wake of the Montreal Massacre in 1989 when Marc Lépine murdered 14 young women at École Polytechnique in a fit of anti-feminist rage. It was titled Our Daughters, Ourselves and ended with this moving paragraph:
“Fourteen of our bright and shining daughters won places in engineering schools, doing things we, their mothers, only dreamed of. That we lost them has broken our hearts. What is worse is that we are not surprised.”
Governor General David Johnston invests Ms. Cameron as a Member of the Order of Canada during a ceremony at Rideau Hall, on Dec. 13, 2013 in Ottawa.PATRICK DOYLE/The Canadian Press
Ms. Cameron was named a member of the Order of Canada in 2012 for her journalism career and her volunteer work. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity by the Vancouver School of Theology in 2004.
She leaves her husband, David, a former dean of arts and sciences at University of Toronto; their daughters, Tassie and Amy, both television producers; and three grandchildren.
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