Saul Rae

Saul Rae (1914-1999) was a Canadian diplomat during the Pearsonian era of Canadian foreign policy.

Rae's father was a gambler who abandoned his wife and five children when they were still young. His mother, Nell, made ends meet by putting the children on the vaudeville circuit as the "Five Raes of Sunshine". The family's success in the entertainment business provided enough financial support to fund Rae's education at the University of Toronto after he graduated from Toronto's Jarvis Collegiate Institute in 1931.

Rae went on to earn a doctorate from Princeton University and was a pioneereing public opinion researcher co-authoring with George Gallup the 1940 book The Pulse of Democracy: Public Opinion and How It Works.

He joined the Department of External Affairs and would spend four decades with the civil service as a career diplomat. Rae was one of the first Canadian diplomats to serve in Paris after its liberation in 1944.

In 1955, he worked on the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam as deputy to the Canadian Commissioner, Sherwood Lett. The role of the commission was to supervise the peace settlement at the end of the First Indochina War. He later served as Canadian Ambassador to France and was, from 1972 to 1976, Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations.

Saul Rae's son, Bob Rae, was leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party and Premier of Ontario while another son John Rae was a senior advisor to Jean Chrétien and is an executive with Power Corporation.

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