Living Trinity June 2026, by Jennifer Matthews
The van to Montreal was booked, the move just days away. Tassie Cameron had applied to the University of Toronto, been turned down for residence because her parents lived eight blocks from campus, and made peace with the alternative: McGill. Then Trinity called. There was a room. She cancelled the van, moved into St. Hilda’s College, and walked into four years that — 35 years later —she credits with shaping much of who she is.
Today, Cameron ’91 is one of the most accomplished television showrunners in Canada — a writer-producer with full creative and operational command of a series from script to screen. Her current project is Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent, now in its fourth season of production.
Coming to Trinity
Cameron grew up in Ottawa, the daughter of journalist Stevie Cameron and political scientist David Cameron, who joined the University of Toronto faculty the same year his eldest daughter finished high school. He has since served as Chair of the Department of Political Science, Vice-President of Institutional Relations, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, and at 85 is still on campus as Special Advisor to the President — a career arc his daughter speaks of with evident admiration.
She had always wanted to study English at U of T, drawn by the university’s reputation and the prospect of living in Toronto. She credits a partly romantic notion of Trinity, shaped in part by Robertson Davies, for the pull toward the College specifically: “the gowns, the fireplaces … I had a kind of idea of it with that old-school English university vibe.”
She arrived not quite knowing what she wanted to do. She enrolled in English, taking courses in religion and French alongside. The plan, vaguely, was “to have something to do with words.”
An unexpected discovery
The Cinema Studies course was supposed to be the easy option. “I thought it’d be sitting in a room, drinking coffee and watching a movie and chit-chatting about it and maybe having a snooze if the movie was boring,” she says. “And these were Russian silent movies.”
The course — an introduction taught by Professor Bart Testa — was rigorous and demanding. It was also, almost immediately, exactly what she wanted. “I fell in love with the medium,” she says. “Once I realized I was going to have to work hard at it, I discovered it wasn’t dissimilar to analyzing prose. But it combined so many other things, too: the visual element, music, my interests in theatre and drama and acting.” She took many more Cinema Studies courses after that, eventually minoring in the subject.
The Quad in the moonlight
Cameron threw herself into life at Trinity. She lived for two years at St. Hilda’s — “Dean Rowlinson was my dean, and she was a legend” — then moved off-campus with Sara Allan ’91, Margaret Sims ’91, and Leslie Ann Dominy ’91 into a house on Lowther Avenue that became, in Cameron’s telling, “infamously known as the House of Hedonism. We had a lot of parties.” Kate Zernike ’90 was a close friend from those years as well, “quite wisely living elsewhere,” Cameron quips. The five remain close friends today.
She was also deeply involved in the Trinity College Dramatic Society, acting and eventually directing. It was that directing opportunity, in her fourth year, that shifted something. “I suddenly realized — oh wait, that’s where the fun is. It’s not acting in this stuff; it’s creating this stuff.” That insight, together with her growing love for film, began steering her away from English literature toward something she didn’t yet have a name for.
What she remembers most about those four years is a feeling of belonging. “I have a visceral memory of the Quad in the moonlight,” she says, “with lots of people running around having fun.”
Paris, then New York
At graduation, Cameron received the Norah Whitney Scholarship — a Trinity graduation award for students proceeding to graduate work in French — to support a year of cinema studies in Paris. The scholarship, she says, made the year financially possible: “I don’t know that I would have been able to go without it. It really, really helped.” She enrolled in a graduate cinema studies program at the Sorbonne, then transferred her credits to New York University, where she completed a Master’s in Cinema Studies.
Eight years in New York followed: documentary work, post-production coordination, and eventually a role as post-production executive at HBO’s film division. She was embedded in the industry — and not writing. She returned to Toronto and attended the Canadian Film Centre’s Writers’ Lab, which launched the professional writing career she has built ever since. She has been a board member of the Canadian Film Centre for years.
Writing Toronto
The career that followed has been built almost entirely on Canadian stories: Flashpoint, Rookie Blue (six seasons, Global and ABC), Mary Kills People, Pretty Hard Cases (CBC and Amazon). The crime thread running through much of her work, she says, is not a coincidence.
Her mother, Stevie Cameron, was one of the defining investigative journalists of her generation. A political columnist for The Globe and Mail, host of CBC’s The Fifth Estate, and author of On the Take — the 1994 bestseller that exposed corruption in the Mulroney government — she also wrote On the Farm, the definitive 2010 account of the Robert Pickton murders. She was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2013, and died in August 2024 at 80. Her influence on her daughter’s creative instincts was direct and daily.
“You’d be hard pressed, with a mother like mine, to avoid talking about policing, crime, criminals, psychopaths, corrupt government officials,” Cameron says. “It was just part of our family’s conversations.” Also part of those conversations was Cameron’s sister, Amy Cameron, a television executive, writer, and producer. The sisters co-founded Cameron Pictures Inc., an independent Canadian television production company, in 2016.
Their father’s world was equally present: David Cameron at U of T meant that politics, policy, and Canadian public life were as much a fixture of the family dinner table conversation as crime.
A love letter to Toronto
When Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent was first announced, Cameron heard the jokes — and laughed. “I’ve lived in New York, I’ve lived in LA, I’ve lived in Paris,” she says. “Toronto is as interesting, as sophisticated, in many ways, as any city I’ve lived in. We have wonderful neighborhoods to film in.”
The show, which launched in 2024 to 1.1 million overnight viewers — Citytv’s biggest drama premiere ever — has sold to more than 80 territories worldwide and won Best Drama Series at the 2025 Canadian Screen Awards. Playback, the Canadian screen industry’s trade publication, named Cameron Showrunner of the Year for 2024.
The show’s commitment to the city is deliberate and specific: Canadian music, Canadian designers, cameos at City Hall and the Rogers Centre, appearances by actors like Don McKellar. And recently, something closer to home: “We have an episode that we shot at St. Michael’s College that’s kind of inspired by my life as an undergrad at Trinity,” she says. “It’s not called U of T — we’re not allowed — but it’s got the vibes of U of T all over it.”
Advice for every first-year student
Cameron’s advice to Trinity students is to resist the pressure to narrow their focus too soon. “I feel like undergrad is the time to delve into whatever interests appeal to you, without a huge focus on what your career will become,” she says.
As for Trinity Reunion this June — her 35th — Cameron hopes to be there. The House of Hedonism is talking about reassembling for the occasion. And the Quad, she says, still holds a special place for her.
“Returning to Trinity just brings me back into that feeling that anything is possible,” she says. “So much of who I am was shaped in those years. There’s real beauty in that.”
Kira Heineck (UC ’91)
