Her exposé on Mulroney and the Airbus Affair led to many legal battles including a judicial hearing to determine if she was an RCMP confidential informant: she was not.
[2] Whitey Dahl died while piloting a bush plane in Labrador on February 14, 1956, leaving Eleanor widowed and the children, including Stephanie, fatherless.
[8] 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.
[9] 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.
Some allegations included the following scandals: Karlheinz Schreiber making payments to him to influence Air Canada's $2 billion purchase of Airbus jetliners (Airbus Affair);[12] maintenance contracts for Canada's CF-18; and a computerized communications system for the foreign affairs department that went $200 million over budget.
[15] The book profiled the bizarre life and death of Bruce Verchere,[16] 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.
Her next book, The Last Amigo: Karlheinz Schreiber and the Anatomy of a Scandal (2001) was co-written with CBC-TV's The Fifth Estate journalist, Harvey Cashore.
[21] This top-selling book examined the actions of Schreiber, who was facing extradition, at the time, to his native Germany to explain his role in a scandal involving kickbacks and bribes.
[26] 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.
[31] Cameron was 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.
[7] Cameron became the focus of a spin campaign by Brian Mulroney's defenders, such as Luc Lavoie, to discredit the allegations against him made in her books.
[33] These articles claimed that Cameron had worked as a confidential informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) during its investigation of the Airbus Affair.
[37] This arose out of the Airbus investigation leading to warrants issued in a case against the company Eurocopter and then sealing of documents that mentioned Cameron in 2001.
[37] Chief Superintendent Allan Matthews, the RCMP officer in charge of the Airbus investigation in 2001, recanted almost all of his previous testimony regarding Cameron's status as a confidential informant at the May 31, 2004 hearing.
[38] Matthews admitted that Cameron was not considered an RCMP confidential informant, contradicting previous assertions he made in court.
[38] On February 14, 2007, Cameron appeared before the House of Commons of Canada Ethics Committee in their examination of the Mulroney Airbus Settlement.
[42] When Justice Oliphant's report was released on May 30, 2010, it conclusively demonstrated that Mulroney had received at least $225,000 from Schreiber, in three equal instalments, in cash, shortly after leaving office in mid-1993.
[46] In recognition of more than two-decades of humanitarian work and social activism, Cameron was invested into the Order of Canada in the 2013 Canadian honours.