As a professional football player he was a star linebacker with the Toronto Argonauts team that won the 1938 Grey Cup.

On 1 November 1944, he volunteered to take over command of a company of The Calgary Highlanders when all their officers were killed or wounded after crossing the Walcheren Causeway.

When the PCs under John Diefenbaker won government in 1957, Hees was named Minister of Transport, and oversaw the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway and the new Halifax International Airport.

In that election, the Liberals replaced the Tories' minority government with one of their own, causing Diefenbaker's succession with Lester B. Pearson as prime minister.

He returned to Parliament in the 1965 election as a PC, defeating Liberal MP Pauline Jewett in the rural riding of Northumberland, and remained in the front rows of the opposition ranks for almost two decades.

On 22 September 1972, Hees forcefully ejected campaign worker Douglas MacDonald from his motel room in Trenton, Nova Scotia.

There is a veterans wing at Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre bearing his name, and near the relocated Crescent School he attended as a child.