Ray Heard

Raymond Elliott Heard was born on December 18, 1935, in South Africa, the son of George and Vida Heard (born Stodden), both journalists. His family described his parents as crusading anti-apartheid journalists. His father was an anti-fascist political journalist at a time when pro-fascist feeling ran high among some Afrikaner nationalists, and in 1945 George Heard mysteriously disappeared. The Heard family came to believe he had been murdered by the Ossewabrandwag for his political beliefs. In a 2015 interview about Remembrance Day, Ray Heard spoke about how deeply the war years and his father's death had affected the family, including the political repercussions his widowed mother faced. His younger brother, Anthony Hazlitt (Tony) Heard, born in Johannesburg in 1937, also became a journalist.

Heard graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg with a BA Honours degree in political science in 1960. That year he won a Frank Knox Fellowship to spend a year at Harvard University, studying in the Government Department, where his teachers included Henry Kissinger and John Kenneth Galbraith. In October 1960, as a 25 year old Rand Daily Mail reporter on fellowship, he wrote an article for The Harvard Crimson titled "South African Describes Verwoerd's Republic", analysing the whites only referendum that turned South Africa into a republic.

Rand Daily Mail (1955 to 1960). Heard began as a political reporter for the Rand Daily Mail, the liberal Johannesburg paper that opposed apartheid. He covered the Treason Trial of Nelson Mandela and other activists from 1956, and broke the story that liberal members of the opposition United Party would split off to found the Progressive Party. His last major assignment before leaving for Harvard was the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre of March 1960.

Montreal Star and Washington (1962 to 1973). After leaving South Africa in the early 1960s he emigrated to Canada and joined the Montreal Star in 1962. In 1963 the paper assigned him to Washington as White House correspondent. For about ten years he was also correspondent for The Observer of London and the South African Morning Group. He covered Lyndon B. Johnson, whom he applauded for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act but criticised over Vietnam, and Richard Nixon through Watergate. His family says he helped Robert F. Kennedy write the 1966 Day of Affirmation Address in Cape Town, known as the "Ripple of Hope" speech, and he was part of Kennedy's entourage when the senator was assassinated in Los Angeles in June 1968.

London and Montreal (1973 to 1979). In 1973 he became editor of The Observer Foreign News Service in London. He returned to the Montreal Star as managing editor in 1976, responsible for all content, and stayed until the newspaper closed in 1979 after an 11 month printers' strike.

Global Television (1979 to 1987). He moved to Toronto as vice president of news and current affairs at the Global Television Network.

Politics and corporate communications. In 1987 he became communications director for John Turner, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and of the Official Opposition. In 2000 he joined the Royal Bank of Canada as communications adviser and speechwriter to chairmen Allan R. Taylor and John Cleghorn. For roughly the last twenty years of his career he was a communications strategist on national initiatives including the development of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. In early 2010 he was part of a consortium with Jerry Grafstein, Beryl Wajsman and Diane Francis that made an unsuccessful bid for the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen and the Montreal Gazette from CanWest.

Commentator. In later years he wrote for the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen and the Huffington Post, and appeared as a political pundit on CTV News Channel, CBC News Network, Global News and the Sun News Network, later continuing with interviews on The Rebel.

Heard's first marriage was to Susan Lenore Lewis, with whom he had two children, Josephine (Josie) Robson of London and Antony Heard of Ottawa. He later married the Canadian journalist Gillian Cosgrove. Their daughter, Jennifer Alison Hazlitt Heard, was born in Toronto on April 26, 1987. She survived a life threatening brain injury at 12, graduated with honours in political science and French from the University of Guelph, and volunteered for causes including the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund. She died in Toronto on June 12, 2015, aged 28, in a fall after a seizure, and Heard wrote her Lives Lived tribute in The Globe and Mail. His son Antony and his brother Tony (who died in 2024) also predeceased him. He had three grandchildren, Katharine, Helena and Thomas Robson. A keen outdoorsman, he kayaked on Bark Lake in Ontario, skied in Vermont and surfed in Kauai, and kept a daily gym routine. On X he described himself as someone who loved Dickens, Paine and Orwell.

Heard was a lifelong opponent of apartheid. He left South Africa partly because, as he later put it, he did not want to raise his family in a racist country, and he regarded Nelson Mandela as his hero and friend. Politically he worked for the Liberal Party under John Turner, but he was independent minded: in the 2008 federal election he endorsed his friend Peter Kent, the Conservative candidate in Thornhill, and in his later punditry he was frequently critical of Liberal governments in Ottawa and at Queen's Park. In 2016 he compared the Brexit vote to the populist revolt he saw building around Donald Trump.

Heard's career connected the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa with Canadian and international journalism. He witnessed the Treason Trial, Sharpeville, the Kennedy and Johnson years, Watergate and the last days of the Montreal Star, and later helped lead Global's newsroom. His role in securing honorary Canadian citizenship for Nelson Mandela in 2001 was, in his own view, his proudest achievement. After his death, journalists including Robert Fife, John Ivison, J.J. McCullough, Michael Taube and Lorrie Goldstein paid tribute, describing a hard nosed newshound who lived so much history and was generous to younger colleagues. The Jennifer Heard Memorial Scholarship at the University of Guelph, named for his late daughter, supports students from immigrant families with financial need.

Heard was awarded a Frank Knox Fellowship to Harvard University in 1960. No other formal awards or honours have been documented in the sources reviewed.

Selected work: "South African Describes Verwoerd's Republic", The Harvard Crimson (October 28, 1960); "The Montreal Star, 30 years later", National Post (September 25, 2009); "Paul Martin's climb up the slippery pole: now what?", Policy Options (December 2003). He appeared regularly as a commentator on Sun News Network (including with Michael Coren) and gave a series of video interviews to Brian Lilley and Ezra Levant of The Rebel in 2015 and 2016 on Canadian, British and American politics.

Ray Heard died peacefully on October 17, 2026, at Toronto General Hospital in Toronto, following a stroke. He was 90 years old, two months short of his 91st birthday (some trade tributes gave his age as 91). His obituary was published in The Globe and Mail from October 24, 2026. A celebration of life is scheduled for Friday, November 6, 2026, at 11 a.m. at Rosedale United Church, 159 Roxborough Drive, Toronto, and will be livestreamed on YouTube. The family asked that donations be made to the Jennifer Heard Memorial Scholarship at the University of Guelph. A burial or resting place has not been made public.