Boy, if only Stevie Cameron were around to expose this scandal

Stevie Cameron, author of On the Take and other obsessive-compulsive disorders, has confessed to being an RCMP informant. Well, no: she has, says the Globe, "admitted [to] being the confidential informant whose identity was protected by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the Eurocopter helicopter-procurement case." How are those different statements? According to Cameron, while the RCMP considered her a confidential informant � to the extent of blacking out her name in court documents � she did not consider herself to be. "You think you're off the record � but when somebody decides for whatever reason to put you down as a confidential informant, you don't know about it." Or maybe it depends on what the meaning of "informant" is:

Ms. Cameron said that until a few weeks ago, she was unaware of the exact definition of a confidential informant. "What I have done is told the police I am not a confidential informant, and they shouldn't be acting as if I am," she said. "I wasn't coded, and I wasn't paid.

Still, we're a long way from "horseshit," aren't we? This is serious stuff. It goes without saying that journalists should not be in the business of spying for the police: it compromises their independence, and exposes other journalists to suspicion. But whether or not she was an informant, Cameron clearly crossed some sort of line, so consumed had she become by her story, even flying to Germany at one point to deliver evidence to prosecutors in a related proceeding. According to RCMP affidavits, the informant whose name they were protecting refused to testify "unless it was for the purpose of the prosecution of Brian Mulroney." But it's worse than that. Much of the "evidence" the police had to suspect Mulroney of taking kickbacks in the Airbus affair was, as we later discovered, furnished by journalists. And the RCMP officer in charge of the investigation, Sgt. Fiegenwald, was forced to step down for leaking confidential information to a journalist � Stevie Cameron. The picture emerges of a recombinant loop of conspiracy theorizing, journalist to policeman and back, each feeding off the other and, it appears, little else. That would be bad enough � but in a case accusing the former Prime Minister of Canada of taking bribes? (Mulroney, it must be said, has not helped his case, admitting recently that he did business with Karlheinz Schreiber, the man alleged to have offered the kickbacks, after he stepped down as PM � a fact he neglected to acknowledge at the time he was suing the government.) I'd say Cameron's career was over, except this is Canada, and her kind of stuff always has a market. She'll probably write a book about her experiences. They could call it On the Sly.