Source
Career
She worked for the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa in the 1960s, and taught English literature at Trent University.
After a year at Le Cordon Bleu Cooking School in Paris in 1975, she began working as a food writer and in 1977, became the food editor of the Toronto Star. A year later, she moved to the Ottawa Journal as Lifestyles editor. She later became the Ottawa Citizen's Lifestyles and Travel editor. Four years later, she joined a new investigative journalism unit at the Citizen and also became a national political columnist.
In 1986, Cameron moved to Toronto as a national columnist and reporter for The Globe and Mail, and published her first book, in 1989, called Ottawa Inside Out. In 1990 she became a host of the CBC Television public affairs program The Fifth Estate but returned to the Globe in 1991 as a freelance columnist and feature writer.
Cameron, Brian Mulroney, and the Airbus Affair
Her second book, On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years, was published in 1994. The book raised questions about the ethics of former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his alleged involvement in secret commissions paid by Karlheinz Schreiber to members of the Government of Canada, and to Conservative-linked lobbyists, in exchange for then-crown corporation Air Canada's purchase of 34 Airbus jets. It was one of the first full-length works to dig into the Airbus Affair in Canada. The book also documented several other corruption scandals during the period. In 1995, Cameron joined Maclean's magazine as a contributor for investigative stories.
Cameron became the focus of a campaign by Brian Mulroney's defenders to discredit the allegations against him. In 2004, The Globe and Mail turned the tables on its former investigative reporter by running a series of three articles by lawyer William Kaplan, claiming that Cameron had worked as a confidential informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police during its investigation of the Airbus Affair. Cameron vigorously denied the allegations, which, if true, would have compromised her credibility as a journalist. In his 2004 book A Secret Trial: Brian Mulroney, Stevie Cameron and the Public Trust, Kaplan outlined evidence that illustrated the RCMP's perception of Cameron as a confidential RCMP informant. But in the spring of 2005 (in testimony in the Eurocopter trial, held in Toronto before Judge Edward Then), Chief Superintendent Al Matthews, the RCMP officer in charge of the Airbus investigation, recanted almost all of the allegations against Cameron contained in a search warrant that had been relied upon by Kaplan. Matthews admitted that Cameron had very few contacts with the RCMP, contradicting assertions he'd made in court that she had possessed several hundred. He also admitted that Cameron was telling the truth when she said any information she had shared with the RCMP was already in the public domain, and that the information she shared was of little help to their investigation.
On 14 February 2007, Cameron appeared before the House of Commons of Canada Ethics Committee in their examination of the Mulroney Airbus Settlement. She confirmed that everything she knows on the subject had been documented in her books. Cameron also made a personal statement that she was not a police informant; any information she had given to the RCMP was already in the public domain at the time.
Cameron was subpoenaed by the Oliphant Commission as a potential witness for the public inquiry called by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in early 2008, under terms defined by David Lloyd Johnston. Ultimately, Cameron was not called as a witness when the inquiry, chaired by Justice Jeffrey Oliphant (former Associate Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Manitoba) got going in Ottawa. Ultimately, it was conclusively demonstrated by the Oliphant Inquiry that Mulroney had received at least $225,000 from Schreiber, in three equal instalments, in cash, paid in thousand-dollar bills, shortly after leaving office in mid-1993. Two of these cash-transfer meetings took place in Montreal, while the third occurred at the luxury Pierre Hotel in New York City. Mulroney had earlier denied any business dealings whatsoever with Schreiber, and had denied receiving any money from him, as a response to questions during his lawsuit testimony given in 1996 in Montreal. Mulroney had delayed paying income tax on this money until several years after he received it.