Last week Bob Rae accepted the University of Toronto Law Faculty Distinguished Alumni Award and called Donald Trump’s offer of bargain rates on missile defence for a newly-annexed Canadian state “a protection racket.” The two additions to his clip file came within a day of each other. Neither was, strictly speaking, part of Rae’s job as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations. But neither the ceremony nor the jab will surprise anyone who has followed any part of his long career.
Both sides of Rae come out in this 2022 interview from the earliest days of this podcast. In it, we discuss the “cascade of crises” that characterized the moment of his appointment to the UN, and which continues. Ukraine, the struggle of leaders in liberal democracies for legitimacy, and the porous borders of his own mandate are among the topics we kicked around. He also kicked me around, briefly, for a cranky column I wrote when he got the UN gig.
Accepting the award at the UofT Law the other day, Rae spoke about the continued relevance of law in a world gone loopy. He said, in part:
“[O]ur freedoms and our survival require us to dedicate ourselves to the rule of law not just in our own cities and towns and countries, but in a world that cannot be alien or foreign to us because it touches us all so closely, and above all because it reflects our common humanity.”
You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and a bunch of other platforms via the “Listen On” button that you can see at the top of this post when you view it on your desktop browser. If you listen on a podcast platform, hit “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, and leave a good review, to help spread the word.
In theory you should be able to find a (machine-generated) transcript of this week’s episode via a "Transcript” button you should be able to find somewhere near the top of this post, but if you can’t find the damned button I can’t help you. Substack handles the coding and they don’t make this stuff easy to find on some platforms. Life is hard sometimes.
I am grateful to be the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Kevin Breit wrote and performed the theme music. Andy Milne plays it on piano at the end of each episode. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.
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