On Her Majesty’s Service.
- The Koreans got confused about his protocol status and put him in George Bush’s suite.
- The Romanians thought he was a spy—and they weren’t far off.
- For years, he smoked cigars given to him—at 3 a.m.—by Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos and repaid the favour by organizing the news conference that brought Marcos down.
- He emptied an entire floor of a hospital to protect the identity of a well-known politician suffering from an incredible week-long drinking binge.
- He launched a mutiny in an African republic’s rent-a-navy and ended up dumped into a lagoon filled with crocodiles.
- He single-handedly forced the serving of beer at Parliament Hill functions and consequently saved taxpayers millions of dollars. (Plus he turned Pierre Trudeau onto Molson Light, which really pissed off his buddies in the Press Gallery).
- Using squeaky-clean diplomatic protocols, he respectfully told the king of Morocco to go fuck Himself.
- He put up a Mercedes as a bribe to help smuggle a rock star through the Iron Curtain.
- He brokered a peace deal between Russia and three of its Baltic neighbours—and then convinced all the participants to do it again for the TV guys who were off playing golf.
- He altered yellow Post-It stickers to fill his parliamentary office with the finest of furniture built for federal cabinet ministers.
- He forged a French version of the original British North America Act ultimately viewed by millions of Canadians who never knew that everything below the cover consisted of blank pages.
- He commandeered a government plane in Quebec City and filled it with booze to get politicians back to Ottawa for a crucial vote.
- When the National Press Club asked him to launch a campaign to raise the thousands of dollars required to build a smoking room, he just financed the whole thing himself and recovered his investment with a Soprano-like “tax” on the club’s puffers.
- He co-founded the amateur rock group that played one concert so loud it drowned out the nightly Sound and Light Show on Parliament Hill and the organizers of that event threatened to bring in Hill security. Alas for them, the band gig was a fund-raiser for that same Hill security.
All of the above describe only one person, Gord Lovelace, who has spent a lifetime finding the funny side of just about everything when he wasn’t stoking the fires that have kept him consistently in hot water.
As reporter, critic, cynic, raconteur, humorist, unlikely diplomat and reluctant spy, Lovelace is a unique Ottawa “fixer” who has been at the centre of scores of events that have made headlines over the last 40 years–and a lot more that nobody, thank God, heard about….
Born and raised in Quebec’s Saguenay Valley, Lovelace almost got a journalism degree at Carleton University before spending the 1970s as a writer, editor and humour columnist at the now defunct Ottawa Journal.
When that paper folded, he joined the Senate as executive assistant to the Speaker, press secretary and director of communications. He left the upper chamber after 15 years to form, in 1995, his own public relations consulting company, also returning to journalism as an on-air satirist with CBC NewsWorld and to ghost-write a well-known newspaper column.
In 2010, he embarked on his fourth stab at retirement (the first three each lasted just days) after a decade of contract work with the Canadian military and other clients.
In his spare time, he tries to keep up with maintenance on his 130-year-old Yuppie slum just down the street from the Governor General and prime minister and spends summers on his island in the middle of a New Brunswick trout lake.
He credits his excellent life-long health to a vegan diet that consists almost exclusively of beer and cigarettes.
