Stevie Cameron

Her second book, On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years,[2] 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.[3] 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.[4]

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.[5] 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.[6]

In 1998, she published her third book, Blue Trust,.[7] The book profiled the bizarre life and death of Bruce Verchere, a Montreal tax lawyer and partner in the national law firm Bennett Jones LLP, who had served as private financial advisor to Mulroney, before committing suicide in late summer 1993. Verchere had left his wife, a very successful entrepreneur, for an affair with the much younger Diane Hailey, daughter of novelist Arthur Hailey, a Verchere client. Just before his suicide, Verchere had been appointed as chairman of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.[8]

The following year, she founded Elm Street, a national general-interest magazine, but continued to write investigative features for Maclean's. Three years later, she resigned from Elm Street, continuing as a columnist, in order to research and write The Last Amigo,[9] with co-author Harvey Cashore; this 2001 book is a biography of Schreiber, along with a more detailed examination of the Airbus Affair. It won a Crime Writers of Canada award as the Best True Crime Book of the Year.[10]

She began researching the Robert Pickton murder case in British Columbia in 2002, and published her first book on the case, The Pickton File,[11] in 2007. Cameron has completed her second book about the Pickton case, On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing Women,[12] which was published by Knopf in the summer of 2010 when a publication ban on the case was lifted after an appeal to Supreme Court of Canada upheld the trial jury's guilty verdict. As well as documenting the botched police investigation that finally led to Pickton's arrest,[13] the book contains important insights into why Pickton offered help to some of the woman he picked up as prostitutes, while brutally murdering others, and how he decided who he would kill.[14] On the Farm was nominated for the 2011 Charles Taylor Prize[15] and won the 2011 Arthur Ellis Award for best non-fiction crime book.[16]

Cameron has also been a contributing editor to Maclean's magazine, a monthly columnist and a contributor to the Toronto Star, The Ottawa Citizen, the Southam News Service, Saturday Night magazine, the Financial Post, Chatelaine, and Canadian Living.

Cameron has lectured on journalism schools across the country, and in 2008, she spent the fall term as Irving Chair in Media at St. Thomas University's journalism school in Fredericton.[17]

In 2012, she was writing a history of Kingston Penitentiary.[18]

• Ottawa Inside Out (1989) ISBN 0-00-637624-X
• On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years (1994) ISBN 0-921912-73-0
• Blue Trust: The Author, the Lawyer, His Wife and Her Money (1998) ISBN 155199027X
• The Last Amigo: Karlheinz Schreiber and the Anatomy of a Scandal (2001) (with Harvey Cashore). ISBN 1-55199-051-2
• The Pickton File (2007) Knopf Canada. ISBN 978-0-676-97953-4
• On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver's Missing Women (2010) ISBN 978-0-676-97584-0