'Hurricane Bob' Rae says he's leaving the United Nations with no regrets

“I once got a little desk thing that says ‘Hurricane Bob,’ because that was my nickname in the department,” he told The Canadian Press in an interview this week.

“The mindset is very — prudence is the key. And you know, not making waves. And I’m afraid I’ve always been more of a wave-maker,” he said. “I don’t regret anything.”

Rae wraps up his time as Canada’s ambassador on Nov. 17, after a five-year term that spanned Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a political crisis with India, Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban and ongoing crises in Haiti, Sudan and Myanmar.

The former Ontario NDP premier and interim federal Liberal leader would not point to a single initiative as Canada’s most important success during his term at the UN. He said he’s proud Canada kept up “steady, persistent engagement with every single issue that the UN is facing.”

That kind of engagement matters, he said, especially when it comes to issues far from the news agenda, such as women’s rights in Afghanistan and reforming the global finance system for development work.

Rae said that to bring more attention to those issues, he pitched a podcast where he would interview various players at the UN and discuss Canada’s policies. He said Global Affairs Canada turned him down.

“I decided it was not worth the effort to fight it, because there are so many barriers to innovation inside a bureaucracy,” he said, adding that political staffers have referred to Global Affairs Canada as “a hotbed of cold feet.”

He instead took to Twitter, now called X. Not all of his social media missives were met with official approval.

“Was I asked to take some things down? Yes. Did I agree all the time? No,” he said. “Sometimes I would go way out of my (lane), I’d go right across five lanes, and they’d say, ‘What are you doing?’”

While he didn’t cite examples, they’re not hard to find. In 2023, Rae posted on X that Azerbaijan’s clearance of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh amounted to “a complete failure of global diplomacy in the face of ethnic cleansing” — a term Ottawa has never used.

In May, he described U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile defence system as a “protection racket.”

In August, Rae deleted a tweet which called out Washington for sanctioning Canadian global jurist Kimberly Prost.

“This U.S. attack on the International Criminal Court and its judges is disgraceful,” he wrote. “Attacks on them by Russia, Israel and the U.S. are intended to weaken and intimidate the international legal system. They must not succeed.”

Analysts contrasted that tweet with Ottawa’s staunch insistence on not criticizing the U.S., for what was widely seen as a precedent-setting move that put a Canadian in American crosshairs.

Rae said he always had a positive working relationship with the department and the Prime Minister’s Office under both Mark Carney and his predecessor, Justin Trudeau.

“There were moments when deputy ministers or people from the Prime Minister’s Office would say, ‘No, please think more about this because there are other implications,’” he said. “And sometimes I agreed with them and I said, ‘Fine.’

“And other times I said, ‘Well, let’s just see what happens.’”

Rae said he’d sometimes tweet perspectives that anticipated where the government was “going anyway.” He argued this would at times be a useful way of gauging the public’s response to policy shifts before they happened.

“When Mr. Trudeau asked me to do this job, I think he knew what he was getting into,” he said. “It became an interesting kind of dance, I guess.”

Rae said he’s confident his successor, former justice minister David Lametti, will advance the human rights issues and values-based policies Canada has been championing for years.

He said he would be “more than surprised” if Canada scrapped its campaign for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council. Rae said everyone’s waiting for Tuesday’s federal budget for “clarification” on Canada’s foreign and security policy.

While Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand’s major speech at the UN General Assembly in September focused heavily on security and economic resilience, Rae noted it also focused on human rights, gender equality, environmental protection and Indigenous rights.

Anand told the General Assembly Canada does not abandon multilateralism even when things get hard. It’s an important point to make in a world with an “empathy deficit that is quite profound,” Rae said.

Rae said that deficit came into sharp focus during his year leading the UN Economic and Social Council, known as ECOSOC.

Rae helmed the council up until August. ECOSOC co-ordinates most UN agencies, including those dealing with refugee support, pandemic response and global rules on civil aviation and postal services.

He said the experience deepened his view that the world is still grappling with the legacy of colonization, which has made it hard for many states to create functioning systems that deliver for their citizens.

“When you come to the UN, you quickly realize that we’re still living in the shadow of the world that was built in the 18th and 19th centuries,” he said. “It’s been a painful experience for a lot of countries.”

He said many of the world’s nations are still trying to get on their feet in a time of climate catastrophes, geopolitical instability and a debt crisis made worse by rising interest rates during the COVID-19 pandemic. It didn’t help that rich countries hoarded vaccines, he added.

“That was a clear message to the Canadian government from the Canadian population. They said, ‘We want the vaccines and we want you to pay attention to us.’ And I think this tension between self-regarding behaviour and empathy is very real,” he said.

“The advanced economies are facing populations that are more and more preoccupied with their own situations. And that makes it difficult for governments in the West to do as much as I believe they should do — including my own government.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 1, 2025.