Stevie Cameron
Stevie Cameron | |
---|---|
Born | Stephanie Dahl October 11, 1943 Belleville, Ontario, Canada |
Occupation | Journalist, writer |
Period | 1977–2012 |
Notable works |
|
Children | 2 (Tassie Cameron) |
Stevie Cameron, CM DD, (October 11, 1943 – August 31, 2024) was a Canadian investigative journalist and author. Born as Stephanie Dahl, into a family with a famously adventurous aviator father, Whitey Dahl, the family would get uprooted between Canada and Switzerland until his death in 1956. She worked for various newspapers such as the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. She co-hosted the investigative documentary series, The Fifth Estate, on CBC-TV in the 1990s. She was also an author of non-fiction books, including On the Take (1994) about former prime minister Brian Mulroney. Besides being a journalist and author, she was also a humanitarian, helping start programs for the underprivileged and homeless such as Second Harvest and the Out of the Cold program. For her lifetime work as a writer and humanitarian, she was invested into the Order of Canada in 2013.
Early life
[edit]Stephanie Dahl was born on October 11, 1943, in Belleville, Ontario.[1] Her father was Harold Edward "Whitey" Dahl, a mercenary American pilot who fought in the Spanish Republican Air Force during the Spanish Civil War.[2] He came to Canada in 1940, and the next year, married her mother, the former Eleanor Roblin Bone, in Belleville.[3] Eleanor’s father, Jameson Bone, was a former mayor of Belleville.[2] Post-war, the whole family moved to Switzerland in 1952 because Whitey Dahl was employed as a pilot by Swiss Air.[4] He was fired in 1953 after he was charged with stealing gold and for having an affair with a Swiss Air hostess.[4] The family then moved back to Canada, with Eleanor and the children going to back to Belleville, while Whitey flew as a bush pilot in Canada's north.[2] Whitey Dahl died while piloting a bush plane in Labrador on February 14, 1956, leaving Eleanor widowed and the children, including Stephanie, fatherless.[5]
Career
[edit]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.[6] 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.[1]
Major works
[edit]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.[7] 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.[1]
Cameron, Brian Mulroney, and the Airbus Affair
[edit]Her second book, On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years,[8] 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.[citation needed]
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.[9]
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.[10] 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.[citation needed]
On February 14, 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.[11]
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.[citation needed]
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.[12]
Blue Trust
[edit]In 1998, her third book, Blue Trust, was published by Macfarlane Walter & Ross.[13] The book profiled the bizarre life and death of Bruce Verchere,[14] 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.[15] Just before his suicide, Verchere had been appointed as chairman of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.[16]
Elm Street Magazine
[edit]In 1996, Cameron was the founding editor of Elm Street, a national general-interest magazine, aimed at university-educated women.[17] The magazine’s mix of serious journalism, recipes, fashion spreads and cheeky tidbits were its main characteristics.[17] Three years later, she resigned as Elm Street’s editor, but continued on as a columnist. She also never stopped writing investigative features for Maclean's during this time. Elm Street continued to publish until 2004, publishing over 400,000 copies per issue eight times a year, distributed freely in newspapers, usually The Globe and Mail.[17] But changes to the way the Print Measuring Bureau's (PMB) methodology on how it counted market share for advertisers, and changes to the Canadian Magazine Fund's funding model, purportedly led to its demise.[18]
The Last Amigo
[edit]Three years later, she resigned from Elm Street, continuing as a columnist, in order to research and write The Last Amigo,[19] 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.[20]
Books on Robert Pickton
[edit]Cameron began researching the Robert Pickton murder case in British Columbia in 2002, and published her first book on the case, The Pickton File, in 2007.[21] Cameron completed her second book about the Pickton case in, On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing Women.[22] It 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.[23] As well as documenting the botched police investigation that finally led to Pickton's arrest,[24] 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.[25] On the Farm was nominated for the 2011 Charles Taylor Prize.[26] It won the 2011 Arthur Ellis Award for best non-fiction crime book.[27]
Other work
[edit]Cameron was 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.[citation needed]
She 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.[28] In 2012, she was writing a history of Kingston Penitentiary.[6]
Humanitarian work
[edit]Cameron served on the board of Second Harvest in Toronto as well as on the board of Portland Place, an assisted housing project for homeless and underhoused people. In 1991, she helped found an Out of the Cold program for the homeless at her church, St. Andrew's, in downtown Toronto, and worked with many churches across Canada to set up similar programs. In 2004, she received an honorary Doctor of Divinity from the Vancouver School of Theology, in part for her work with the homeless.[29]
In recognition of more than two-decades of humanitarian work and social activism, Cameron was awarded the Order of Canada in December 2012.[30] Her citation reads: "For her achievements in investigative journalism and for her volunteer work on behalf of the disadvantaged."[31]
Personal life and death
[edit]She married David Cameron, a professor at the University of Toronto, and they had two daughters, Amy and Tassie Cameron.[32]
Stevie Cameron died at her home in Toronto on August 31, 2024 at the age of 80.[32] She had been afflicted by Parkinson’s disease and dementia in the final years of her life.[1]
Bibliography
[edit]Non-fiction
[edit]- 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
Awards
[edit]- 2011 Arthur Ellis Award for On The Farm, Best Crime Non-Fiction Book of the Year
- 2008 Irving Chair in Media, St. Thomas University, September–November 2008
- 2004 Honorary Doctorate of Divinity and convocation speaker, Vancouver School of Theology at UBC, for journalism and work with the homeless
- 2003 Honorary Diploma & Commencement speaker, Loyalist College of Applied Arts and Technology, Belleville, June 2003, for journalism and community work
- 2003 City of Toronto Community Service Award for work with the homeless
- 2002 Arthur Ellis Award (Crime Writers' of Canada) for The Last Amigo, Best Crime Non-Fiction Book of the Year (with Harvey Cashore)
- 1998 Business Book of the Year Merit Award for Blue Trust
- 1998 Windsor Press Club: Golden Quill Award for journalism
- 1995 Periodical Marketers’ Awards: Book of the Year & Author of the Year, for On the Take
- 1988 Centre for Investigative Journalism Award honorable mention for a 1987 story in The Globe and Mail about the amounts the PC Canada fund paid for decorating the prime minister's residence.[33]
References
[edit]- ^ a b c d Drinkwater, Rob (September 2, 2024). "Investigative journalist Stevie Cameron dies at home in Toronto, age 80". The Canadian Press. Toronto. Archived from the original on September 2, 2024. Retrieved September 2, 2024.
- ^ a b c CP Staff (February 18, 1956). "Whitey Dahl found dead in Labrador". Toronto Daily Star. The Canadian Press. p. 3. Archived from the original on September 3, 2024. Retrieved September 2, 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ Star Staff (August 9, 1941). "Blonde Not Dahl's Wife Mr. Franco Wuz Robbed". Toronto Daily Star. p. 1. Archived from the original on September 3, 2024. Retrieved September 2, 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ a b AP & UP Staff (December 9, 1953). "Swiss Seek Whitey Dahl RCAF Adventurer". Toronto Daily Star. Associated Press & United Press International. p. 42. Archived from the original on September 4, 2024. Retrieved September 4, 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ CP Staff (February 18, 1956). "Whitey Dahl found dead in Labrador". Toronto Daily Star. The Canadian Press. p. 1. Archived from the original on September 4, 2024. Retrieved September 4, 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ a b Ferguson, Rob (December 31, 2012). "Prestigious group nets top honours". Toronto Star. p. A3. Retrieved September 2, 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ Ottawa Inside Out, 1989, Key Porter (HarperCollins paperback 1990); ISBN 0-00-637624-X
- ^ On the Take: Crime Corruption & Greed in the Mulroney Years, 1994, Macfarlane Walter & Ross (Seal paperback, 1995) ISBN 0-921912-73-0
- ^ "Stevie Cameron corrects The Globe". The Globe and Mail. Bell Globemedia. October 13, 2004. Archived from the original on February 22, 2006.
- ^ Zarek, Elysse (June 1, 2005). "The Wrong Arm of the Law". Review of Journalism (Summer 2005). Archived from the original on September 3, 2024. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
- ^ CP & Globe Staff (February 14, 2008). "Mulroney-Schreiber affair remains a can of worms". The Globe and Mail. Toronto: Bell Globemedia. Archived from the original on February 20, 2008.
- ^ The Truth Shows Up, by Harvey Cashore, 2010, Key Porter Books, Toronto.
- ^ Hrabluk, Lisa (December 19, 1998). "Sex, lies and secret bank accounts". New Brunswick Telegraph Journal. Saint John, New Brunswick: CanWest Digital Media. p. 8. ProQuest 423057533. Retrieved September 3, 2024 – via ProQuest.
- ^ McGran, Kevin (December 26, 1998). "Cameron spins great Canadian yarn". The Kingston Whig-Standard. Kingston, Ontario. p. 6. ISSN 1197-4397. ProQuest 353012857. Retrieved September 3, 2024 – via ProQuest.
- ^ Dickson, Rosaleen (December 21, 1998). "Blue trust: the author, the lawyers, his wife, & her money". The Hill Times. Ottawa. p. n/a. ISSN 0848-0427. ProQuest 208531775. Retrieved September 3, 2024 – via ProQuest.
- ^ CP Staff (June 28, 1993). "Bruce Howe named head of nuclear agency". Toronto Star. The Canadian Press. p. B1. Retrieved September 3, 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ a b c Bordeau, Annette (March 1, 2004). "So Long, Elm Street". Ryerson Review of Journalism (Winter 2004). Toronto: Ryerson University. ISSN 0838-0651. Archived from the original on April 6, 2016. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
- ^ Gray, Jeff (January 10, 2004). "Elm Street to stop publishing". The Globe and Mail. Toronto: Bell Globemedia. Archived from the original on September 3, 2024. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
- ^ The Last Amigo: Karlheinz Schreiber and the Anatomy of a Scandal, 2001, Macfarlane Walter & Ross (co-author: Harvey Cashore); ISBN 1-55199-051-2
- ^ "About the CWC Awards of Excellence". crimewriterscanada.com. Crime Writers of Canada. Archived from the original on April 22, 2024. Retrieved September 2, 2024.
- ^ Matas, Robert (September 2007). "A History of Invisibility". Literary Review of Canada. 15 (7). Toronto: 9–10. ISSN 1188-7494. ProQuest 222604863. Retrieved September 3, 2024 – via ProQuest.
- ^ Bethune, Brian (October 11, 2010). "Books: MACLEAN'S BESTSELLERS". Maclean's. 123 (39). Toronto: Rogers Publishing: 84. ISSN 0024-9262. ProQuest 758411328. Retrieved September 2, 2024 – via ProQuest.
- ^ Levitz, Stephanie (August 14, 2010). "Woman tell tales of escape from serial killer Pickton". Prince Albert Daily Herald. Prince Albert, Saskatchewan: TC Transcontinental. The Canadian Press. p. 8. ProQuest 2003084990. Retrieved September 2, 2024 – via ProQuest.
- ^ PostMedia Staff (September 24, 2010). "Book Review: On the Farm, by Stevie Cameron". National Post. Toronto: PostMedia Netork. Archived from the original on September 3, 2024. Retrieved September 2, 2024.
- ^ CP Staff (August 15, 2010). "Pickton book explores role of cops, killers in deaths". CTV News. Toronto. The Canadian Press. Archived from the original on October 22, 2012. Retrieved September 2, 2024.
- ^ Woods, Stuart (January 11, 2011). "Charles Taylor Prize announces nominees". Quill and Quire. Toronto: St. Joseph Media. Archived from the original on September 2, 2024. Retrieved September 2, 2024.
- ^ CBC Staff (June 3, 2011). "Louise Penny nabs crime writing prize". CBC News. Archived from the original on July 3, 2018. Retrieved September 2, 2024.
- ^ University Staff (2017). "Christine Morris Named 2017 Irving Chair in Journalism". School of Journalism. Fredericton: St. Thomas University. Archived from the original on December 2, 2021. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
- ^ "37th Parliament, 3rd Session". Hansard: Debates of the House of Commons of Canada. 139 (46): 1405. May 3, 2004. Archived from the original on September 3, 2024. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
- ^ Medley, Mark (December 31, 2012). "Stevie Cameron, Scott Griffin among recipients of Order of Canada". National Post. Toronto: Postmedia Network. Archived from the original on January 29, 2013. Retrieved September 2, 2024.
- ^ GG Staff (December 30, 2012). "91 New Appointments to the Order of Cananda". Governor General of Canada Honours. Ottawa: King's Printer for Canada. Archived from the original on September 24, 2015. Retrieved September 2, 2024.
- ^ a b CBC Staff (September 1, 2024). "Canadian journalist, author and philanthropist Stevie Cameron dead at 80". CBC News. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Archived from the original on September 2, 2024. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
- ^ CP Staff (March 28, 1988). "Toronto exposé wins major journalism award". The Ottawa Citizen (Final ed.). The Canadian Press. p. A12. Archived from the original on October 21, 2021. Retrieved October 25, 2021 – via Newspapers.org.
External links
[edit]- Stevie Cameron official Twitter page
- Stevie Cameron on Secret Sources CBC-TV (2003)
- Stevie Cameron online interview with THECOMMENTARY.CA, June 2007
- 1943 births
- 2024 deaths
- Canadian people of American descent
- Canadian newspaper journalists
- Canadian Presbyterians
- University of British Columbia alumni
- Canadian television journalists
- Canadian magazine journalists
- Journalists from Ontario
- Writers from Belleville, Ontario
- Canadian women television journalists
- Canadian investigative journalists
- Canadian political journalists
- 20th-century Canadian journalists
- 21st-century Canadian journalists
- 20th-century Canadian women writers
- Centre for Investigative Journalism Award winners
- 20th-century Canadian non-fiction writers
- 21st-century Canadian non-fiction writers
- Canadian women non-fiction writers
- 21st-century Canadian women writers
- Deaths from Parkinson's disease in Canada