Born in Belleville, Ontario, Stevie Cameron has an honours B.A. in English from the University of British Columbia, worked for the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa in the 1960s, attended graduate school at University College London, England for three years 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 become a host of the CBC Television public affairs program The Fifth Estate but returned to the Globe in 1991as a freelance columnist and feature writer. 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 in exchange for then-crown corporation Air Canada's purchase of a large number of Airbus jets. It became the number one best selling non-fiction book in Canada in both 1994 and 1995. In 1995, Cameron joined Maclean’s as a contributor for investigative stories.

In 1998 she published her third book, Blue Trust, and 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, a book published in 2001about the Airbus affair. It won a Crime Writers of Canada award as the Best True Crime Book of the Year.[1]

She 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. 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, 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.

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. [2]

Cameron became the focus of a campaign by Mulroney's defenders to discredit the allegations against him.

In 2004, the The Globe and Mail turned the tables on its former investigative reporter by running a series of 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, Chief Superintendent Al Matthews, the RCMP officer in charge of the Airbus investigation, admitted in sworn testimony before Judge Edward Then that almost all the allegations he made about Cameron in a search warrant used by Kaplan for his information were untrue. Matthews admitted that Cameron had had very few contacts with the RCMP, contradicting assertions he'd made in court that she had had several hundred. Matthews also admitted that Cameron was telling the truth when she said any information she'd shared with the RCMP was already in the public domain and that the information she shared was of little help to their investigation.

On February 14, 2007, Cameron appeared before the Canadian House of Commons 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 not a police informant and that any information she had given to the RCMP was already in the public domain at the time. [4] [5] Cameron was subpoenaed by the Oliphant Commission [www.oliphantcommission.ca] as a potential witness for the public inquiry called by Prime Minister Stephen Harper but ultimately was not called as a witness.

Cameron serves 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.[6] In 1991 she helped found an Out of the Cold program for the homeless at her church, St. Andrew’s, in downtown Toronto, and has 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.[7]