(Continued from Part 2, previous blog post)
Whether or not author Stevie Cameron was a “conspiracy theorist” in her crusade against corruptions associated with former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s government, the second type of criticisms of her as mentioned earlier – namely about a possible personal grudge by her toward Mr. Mulroney whose rise to power in 1984 ended her husband’s promising career as a federal government official in Ottawa – may have provided an angle for a unique glimpse into something that likely was more than personal but serious opposition to Mr. Mulroney’s agendas and policies – opposition that no doubt has been a constituent of support for Ms. Cameron, cheering her investigative journalistic crusade.
As pointed out in an earlier part of this blog article and the Notes, in the early 1980s Ms. Cameron’s husband David Cameron was a federal official handling constitutional and federal-provincial relation issues in the Liberal government of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and as such he played a role in Mr. Trudeau’s enactment of the first Canadian Constitution in 1982; he was apparently let go when the Mulroney government came to power.
Ms. Stevie (Dahl) Cameron apparently had married (in the mid-1960s) an exceptionally able intellectual and civil servant – regardless of how he would have faired within the Mulroney government – for very soon after he had been let go David Cameron became the vice president of institutional and governmental relations at Canada’s leading university, the University of Toronto. 77
Then in 1987 only several months after Stevie Cameron’s series of newspaper articles had become famous about Mr. Mulroney’s 50 pairs of Gucci shoes as well as other lifestyle trappings of the Mulroney family, David Cameron was appointed deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs in the Liberal provincial government of then Ontario premier David Peterson. 78
Further along, in early 1989 when Stevie Cameron’s first book, Ottawa inside out: power, prestige and scandal in the nation’s capital, was to be published in the fall and “most insiders” were expecting it to become a bestseller, David Cameron was appointed special adviser to Ontario Premier Peterson on constitutional reform as well as Ontario’s senior representative to the province of Quebec. 79
Previously I have pointed out that the left-leaning Canadian media and the large Canadian federal government system were two major sources of opposition to the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney in his early years as prime minister, 1984-1988. Here, the career moves of David Cameron, formerly an underling of Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau, during this period of time showcased exactly that, namely the embrace of David Cameron by the left-leaning Canadian intelligentsia right after he was let go by the incoming Mulroney government, and then further embraces of him by the Liberal-controlled government of Canada’s largest and most powerful province in which the national capital is also located – as his wife’s high-profile anti-Mulroney journalistic crusade was picking up steam in stages.
To better understand that the differences between the Trudeau Liberals and the Mulroney Conservatives were fundamental, one needs to take into account that Mr. Mulroney brought in not only the policies of economic privatization and free trade to dismantle the core of the Trudeau government’s socialist, government control-centered economic and social doctrines, 80 but also a set of agendas of decentralization and regionalization of government power, which included aligning with some of the Quebec sovereigntists-separatists (such as Lucien Bouchard, Mulroney’s old friend from his law school days), that were aimed at radically changing the orientation and the scope of the Canadian Constitution which the staunchly federalist Mr. Trudeau had brought in not long before without the agreement of the French-speaking province of Quebec; Mr. Trudeau would become dead set against these agendas during the entire Mulroney era. 81, 82
Thus, from 1987 to 1990 as a key Ontario official-adviser on intergovernmental and constitutional affairs under then Liberal premier David Peterson, David Cameron was in an important position during the period of the Meech Lake constitutional reform, sitting across the table from representatives of the Mulroney Conservative federal government; 83 this the general public knew less than they knew about the newspaper articles and a book from Stevie Cameron outing the Mulroney lifestyles and chronicling Mulroney government scandals.
After the Meech Lake constitutional accord ultimately failed in 1990, Mr. Mulroney proceeded to give former Prime Minister Joe Clark a leading role on constitutional affairs within his government and bring on the Charlottetown constitutional reform, and Mr. Clark brought the aboriginal people of Canada into the constitutional process. 84 At this time, the even more leftwing, recently elected Ontario government of New Democrat premier Bob Rae turned to David Cameron once more who had returned from his posting in Quebec and was acting in his former job of deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs, again naming Cameron the special constitutional adviser to the premier. 85
That David Cameron played a key role for Ontario in the 1992 Charlottetown constitutional reform, has been recorded in a rather controversial way – at the centre of the Diane Wilhelmy affair in September-October 1992 about a taped phone conversation between Diane Wilhelmy, then Quebec deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs, and an unnamed official (later identified as Andre Tremblay, constitutional adviser to Premier Bourassa); the tape recorded the other official using very nasty language to say things about three Ontarians, one of them David Cameron; the Ontarians were blamed for ‘ripping off’ Quebec in the constitutional negotiations in which Premier Bourassa did not perform well under pressure: 86
“XX: We’re walking on our knees, as you know, eh? I think mine are full of holes … We were aggressed, badgered, fatigued. In other words, there were an awful lot of those types of problems. It’s tough to take, psychologically having all these people against you. And they’re all against us. And those Ontarians, they’re the worst sons of bitches you can imagine. Worse than that. It’s terrible.
DW: That’s what we were saying last year. It hasn’t gotten any better, eh?
XX: Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. They are truly, to use a bad word … and Jeff Rose is a perfect one. Bornstein is double-faced, triple-faced. And David Cameron: there’s a guy who’s profoundly hypocritical. And who tells us things that are unbelievable …
DW: Phew, what madness. But when I saw yesterday on television that it was starting all over again. And that they were even going back on the Supreme Court and immigration. Then I said to myself, it’s a national disgrace. We should leave. Mr. Bourassa should take the plane right away and come back here. What a humiliation to arrive at that point.”
Such were how key constitutional officials-negotiators under then Quebec premier Robert Bourassa, whom Brian Mulroney had personally taken pains – bypassing participants in the constitutional negotiations from the other regions – to persuade to join in the negotiations, 87 talked about David Cameron (and the other Ontarians) in 1992.
In comparison, the raps Stevie Cameron got in 1998 from media baron Conrad Black, discussed earlier, were more civil, barring what might be considered a veiled threat of jail from Black.
During the Charlottetown constitutional negotiations in 1992 Premier Bourassa was “fatigued” and did not do well, partly due to the long hours and the intensity of the negotiations and partly because shortly after the Meech Lake accord he had undergone treatments for a serious form of skin cancer, which Brian Mulroney personally noted during his public campaign for the Charlottetown accord’s passage in the upcoming October 26, 1992 national referendum, and which would be discovered already spreading shortly after the Charlottetown accord failed in the referendum; Bourassa would ultimately died of it on October 2, 1996. 88
Premier Bourassa himself at the time of the Wilhelmy affair acknowledged that the affair, involving national publicity on negative opinions from the Quebec government’s top two constitutional experts, 89 swayed public opinion in his province against the Charlottetown constitutional accord he had helped negotiate. 90 In the end, the Wilhelmy affair became one of the major factors contributing to the accord’s defeat in Quebec in the October 26, 1992 referendum held across Canada. 91
If one wonders whether Brian Mulroney was mindful, then and later, of how some Quebecers loathed David Cameron’s role in the 1992 Charlottetown constitutional process, and of the fact that Cameron’s wife Stevie Cameron was a journalist-author writing about corruptions in his government, one can take note of the following fact which seems to have been overlooked: Mulroney not only publicly acknowledged during the October 1992 referendum campaign for the Charlottetown accord that the prospect of its passing was hurt by the Wilhelmy affair, but when the Airbus Affair became the top news story in November 1995 partly thanks to publicity from Stevie Cameron’s second bestselling book, On the take: crime, corruption and greed in the Mulroney years, Mulroney would choose lawyer Gerald Tremblay of the law firm McCarthy Tetrault as his lead lawyer for the $50 million defamation lawsuit against the RCMP and the Canadian government – the same lawyer previously representing Diane Wilhelmy in September 1992 trying to get a court injunction to prevent the phone conversation tape (and its transcript) from being aired by the media in Quebec (a partial transcript quoted above had been published in Ontario). 92
Just like her background in the intelligence field being helpful to her in investigative journalism, for author Stevie Cameron her husband David Cameron and his background likely have been a crucial source of strength of support for her, with his experience and knowledge of federal politics and the federal government system, and his connections especially to those with profound disagreements with Brian Mulroney in their outlooks for Canada.
Stevie Cameron knew as much as anyone how difficult and dangerous anti-corruption campaign could be to the campaigner. It has been mentioned in the Notes of an earlier part of this blog article that just when her second book, On the take: crime, corruption and greed in the Mulroney years, was to become public one of her daughters was threatened and a number of offices of her publishers and typesetting company were vandalized.
By looking at whom Ms. Cameron has dedicated each of her books to, her stated fears seemed to have manifested there as well: her 1989 book on Ottawa politics and business lobbying was dedicated to her husband David Cameron and their daughters Tassie and Amy, her 1994 book on corruptions in the former Mulroney government and Mulroney circles was dedicated to David Cameron, her 1998 book on former Mulroney tax lawyer and financial trustee Bruce Verchere and his ultimate suicide was dedicated to her mother, Eleanor Roblin Bone Dahl, who had passed away in 1997 (a sad episode about the timing of Eleanor Dahl’s passing has been discussed in the Notes of an earlier part of this blog article), and her 2001 book on Karlheinz Schreiber was again dedicated to David and Tassie and Amy. One can understand that losing her own mother probably made Ms Cameron feel sorry for Bruce Verchere, but omitting her daughters’ names in the one book about Mulroney government corruptions – out of the three books where her husband’s name received mention?
Some persons had already died in mysterious circumstances after they had become entangled in the web of the former Mulroney government’s money, according to Cameron’s 1994 book, On the take: crime, corruption and greed in the Mulroney years: besides what have been mentioned in this blog article about the story of Bruce Verchere (and his suicide), there had been other mysterious deaths of Tory associates of Brian Mulroney’s (that had also been ruled as suicides but were disputed), namely the deaths of John Grant and Roger Nantel who in different capacities had been in charge of dispensing federal government money. (In the Notes of the earlier parts of this blog article I have also mentioned the premature deaths of Frank Moores and Gary Ouellet, noting that my own father passed away in 2005 exactly one month after Moores.)
As mentioned in some of the earlier Notes, I myself was once in peaceful political activity, in late 1992 in Vancouver, attempting to publicly air criticisms of then prime minister Brian Mulroney’s leadership in general and especially his conduct during the Charlottetown constitutional process, sending press releases to some media outlets. At the time, I was quite critical of certain aspects of the final version of the accord reached under Brian Mulroney but was upbeat about the preliminary version reached by Joe Clark after extensive national consultations; I was also critical of certain ways in which Mr. Mulroney had handled the constitutional reforms. But my efforts at airing criticisms brought nothing but personal misery.
A better example of the consequences of anti-corruption crusade, one Cameron as a journalist also wrote about extensively, is the personal experiences of Glen Kealey, an Ottawa-area businessman who had had a dispute with some of the Mulroney associates during the early years of the Mulroney government – regarding an alleged 5%-kickback request from Mulroney cabinet minister Roch LaSalle especially – and subsequently embarked on a campaign to publicize, and to criminally prosecute corruptions in the Mulroney government: he became financially broke and penniless. 93
Glen Kealey not only lost all his business and money, but after years of hard campaign – including daily protests outside the national parliament lasting through the end of the Mulroney era – achieved only meager results: only one person out of 13 Tory politicians and 3 senior RCMP officers Kealey had wanted to prosecute, namely the former Mulroney cabinet minister Roch LaSalle, was charged by the Ontario Provincial Police (but not by RCMP); the OPP then missed the deadline for proceeding with the criminal charges – interestingly around the time in September 1992 when transcript of the Wilhelmy affair phone-conversation first went public (in Ontario without Quebec court approval) – and eventually dropped the charges and the investigation altogether in 1994. 94
In one of her first newspaper articles reporting on the Glen Kealey story, Cameron even quoted what was written on Kealey’s protest placard outside the House of Commons in the capital: 95
“RCMP always get their man – but not their politicians”.
It would be naive to believe that having a husband in David Cameron has not made her life easier and her challenging endeavour more possible for Stevie Cameron.
If, as we have seen, that the criticisms of author Stevie Cameron about her adventurousness in investigative journalism and about possible influence of her marriage on her professional work, when examined carefully, actually served to highlight the seriousness of some of the context and backgrounds to her anti-Mulroney-corruption crusade, then the criticisms about the cultural peculiarity of her religious background (Presbyterian) could threaten to turn her into a ‘saint’ of the society in the eyes of the poor, and justify her crusade in a way that a “sycophant” label on her alone cannot achieve.
Or at least that has been how a ‘progressive’ sector in the Catholic Church in Canada want others to see Stevie Cameron as, i.e., a saint for the poor; they have been hailing her as “street-side saviour of Canada’s destitute”, not so much for her anti-corruption journalistic crusade but for her work helping the poor since 1990-91 when she co-founded the “Out-of-the-Cold” program as an elder at the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in downtown Toronto, personally doing gourmet cooking for the homeless on a regular basis (at a time when she already had a solid journalistic reputation that included her 1987 Mulroney-lifestyles articles, her 1989 book on Ottawa politics and her hosting of the CBC’s The Fifth Estate), as well as for her work on behalf of missing prostitutes in Vancouver Downtown Eastside when in 1999 while at the helm of the Elm Street magazine she and writer Daniel Wood publicized the story of the missing prostitutes, which according to this progressive Catholic view “sparked public interest and a subsequent police investigation”, eventually leading to the prosecution of Robert William Pickton. 96
The word ‘progressive’ emphasizes that accolade of such a saintly proportion accorded Stevie Cameron was not exactly universal but very much from a leftwing, educated, and feminism-friendly part of the society, and very much to do with her willingness to break with certain societal stereotypes. As the founding editor-in-chief of the Elm Street magazine, a women’s publication more about fashion and lifestyles than about crime, catering to educated and affluent female readers and with a good nationwide circulation, 97 Ms. Cameron was willing to devote a considerable number of high-profile pages to the story of Vancouver missing prostitutes, with the written story commissioned from Vancouver writer Daniel Wood appearing in November 1999; but hers was not the first major story in the general media about the missing prostitutes since there had been press reports as early as April 1999 on attentions to the problem from then B.C. attorney general Ujjal Dosanjh and Vancouver mayor Philip Owen, and in July of that year there was American TV coverage of the issue – by the popular show America’s Most Wanted. 98
But at where Stevie Cameron was, i.e., in November 1999 at the helm of Elm Street magazine, her story was like a feast. And then the magazine went under within a few short years. 99
This is not to suggest that Stevie Cameron’s willingness or propensity to get into crime stories and now into about those near the bottom of the society, had to do with the demise in 2004 of a 7-year-old magazine that otherwise was competing with established, glossy and sexy Canadian magazines the likes of Saturday Night, and Chatelaine. For this it should be noted that one year later in 2005 the 118-year-old Saturday Night magazine, Canada’s oldest magazine and owned by the same publisher of Elm Street (Multi-Vision Publishing, by then part of St. Joseph Media) but previously owned by media baron Conrad Black, also ceased publication. 100
However it is more interesting to note that the Catholic newspaper that had in 2003 hailed Cameron as “street-side saviour of Canada’s destitute”, Catholic New Times, also folded, in 2006 two years after Elm Street, with its last issue dated November 26 – coincidentally exactly one year from the last issue of Saturday Night: this independent Catholic newspaper had been around since 1976, with a long history of dissent on Church doctrines going back to under founding editor Sister Mary Jo Leddy, and its liberal stands on many issues such as female priesthood, abortion and same-sex marriage irritated the Church greatly. 101 The newspaper became openly critical of Pope John Paul II toward and at the end of his papacy in 2005, and provided a forum for, among others, openly-gay dissenter James Loney, a Christian peace activist and former Canadian hostage in Iraq; 102, 103 but most importantly, the readership of Catholic New Times declined substantially over the years, not the least to do with recent boycott by local Catholic parishes in Ontario. 104
Being revered by a progressive sector of the Catholic Church could mean more controversy for author Stevie Cameron, and so for the interest of readers of this blog article criticisms of her regarding influence of her Presbyterian background are here viewed in the limited context as they were expressed (and cited in an earlier part of this blog article).
One can guess that a “self-righteous self-flatterer” and someone of “Victorian sensitivity” and “inbred puritanism of the old Ottawa establishment”, probably meant that although righteous and progressive the person was deeply affected by certain more conservative roots; I However find it difficult to interpret the meaning of the description, “a Presbyterian spinster’s detailed account of an orgy in the choir loft”, as I have no experience with what type of a ‘double standard’ it might be, and as apparently Stevie Cameron has been happily married to David Cameron since the 1960s.
There indeed had been conservative influence in Stevie Cameron’s family background, and she has been open about it: a great-great-grandfather, a grandfather and an uncle of hers had been Tory politicians, and in the 1970s she once campaigned for Tory candidate Duff Roblin (a name which I suspect could be related to her mother, Eleanor Roblin Bone Dahl) in Peterborough, Ontario. 105 But that background had not prevented Cameron from developing her passion for anti-corruption investigative journalism focused on the former Mulroney Conservative government.
With or without praises from some on the Catholic Church side, the Out-of-the-Cold program started by Cameron at the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Toronto has been very widely praised and has been an inspiration for people from other walks of life, including professional chefs, lawyers and healthcare professionals, to participate in or start various charity programs helping the homeless. 106
Perhaps it’s best to take a look at how the Presbytery of Eastern Toronto has described the Out-of-the-Cold program founded by Stevie Cameron at St. Andrew’s Church in this presbytery – in a September 2005 article titled, “A united effort crowns righteousness”, written by staff writer Amy MacLachlan of the Presbyterian Record. 107
Its opening passage is about the area of the presbytery:
“As one of the church’s largest and richest presbyteries, East Toronto occupies an interesting spot on the landscape. Even though it was only created in 1949 (when the Presbytery of Toronto was divided into east and west), its history includes some of the oldest churches of the denomination in Canada. …”
Obviously this had to be a rich church where Ms. Cameron has been, or it could not afford serving gourmet food to the homeless.
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