Campbell was born in Montreal and raised in the nearby suburb of Hudson,[1] where she was a childhood friend of her future Toronto City Council colleague Jack Layton.
[2] After Cressy announced that he would not run for reelection in the 1982 municipal election, Campbell and Barbara Hall competed for the Metro New Democratic Party endorsement to be its second candidate alongside David Reville in the Ward 7 race.
[5] Campbell and other NDP-affiliated city councillors — including Reville, Layton, Richard Gilbert, Dorothy Thomas and Joe Pantalone — also collaborated on a job creation plan at the height of the early 1980s recession.
[9] Although the developer sought and won an Ontario Superior Court decision ordering the city to issue the demolition permits, Campbell was one of 11 councillors, alongside Gilbert, Pantalone, Layton, Reville, Thomas, Rowlands, Dale Martin, Anne Johnston, Ron Kanter and Chris Korwin-Kuczynski, who walked out of council chambers to prevent the meeting from attaining quorum.
[12] She continued to identify as a New Democrat politically, stating that she had chosen to leave the NDP group not because of any change in her basic ideology, but because she no longer had faith in the value of trying to create a political party structure at Toronto City Hall,[13] and felt that the NDP caucus was missing opportunities to advance its policy goals by collaborating across party lines.
[19] Gilbert was selected to replace Campbell as the city's representative on Metro Council's executive committee,[20] and Roger Hollander won a by-election on October 9, 1987 to succeed her in Ward 7.
[24] After the project was completed, the duo returned to Toronto, where Cressy accepted a fundraising position with George Brown College and Campbell attended the institution as a student in its chef training program.