Cameron was born in Nova Scotia on 11 February 1941 and educated at Truro Senior High School (winning the Governor General's award in 1958) and Mount Allison University before winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford.
He was then a lecturer at Mount Allison University before completing a post-graduate degree at Oxford in 1968 entitled "Old English nouns of colour: a semantic study".
In 1968, he was appointed as a lecturer in the Department of English and Centre for Medieval Studies by the University of Toronto, becoming a professor in 1977 and being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1982.
Work on this project was still ongoing at the time of his death, leading to the university becoming a centre of the study of Old English.
Declining health in later life prevented him taking up the appointment as Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies.