It was just one of several signals that the Oct. 19 election that gave Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a majority Liberal government might renew the country’s role as a leader in global development.

Arriving at his offices in the Pearson Building, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion was greeted by cheers from civil servants. Trudeau himself, steeped in internationalism almost from the crib, has been abroad for much of his first month in office.

To a large extent, buffing a tarnished image will depend on Canada’s commitment to foreign aid.

While campaigning, the Liberals said the Harper government had shifted aid priorities to “reflect political and commercial interests to the detriment of the needs of the poorest and most fragile countries.” They promised to restore Canada’s status as an “engaged player on the world stage.”

Organizations on the front lines of world poverty, heartened by the new tone, will be watching carefully to see if Liberal deeds match good intentions.

Over the last decade, Canada has been a diminishing actor in foreign aid, with spending falling to $4.2 billion in 2014, down from $5.6 billion two years earlier.

Despite long-standing pledges to commit 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income to foreign aid (a level first championed by former prime minister Lester Pearson), the level fell last year to 0.24 per cent.

After a respectable start on the foreign aid file, the former Conservative government announced in 2010 a five-year freeze on development assistance in order to address its deficit at home. The freeze was scheduled to end this year, but was extended in the April budget. As well as the reduced funding, there were concerns as well that the Harper government had shifted assistance from sub-Saharan Africa, where need is acute, to better-off countries with trade potential.

While the Conservative government won applause for its role in improving maternal, newborn and child health, the overall reviews on development were poor.

In fact, the declining role was so great, according to the Canadian International Council, that Canada had essentially become an international “free rider.”

Aid organizations, for their part, took Trudeau’s cabinet appointments in portfolios relevant to their work as an indication that improvements might be afoot.

In Dion they have a foreign affairs minister well-versed in environmental issues and climate change as a major factor in need. International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland brings a long-standing concern with inequality to her post.

And the appointment of Quebec’s Marie-Claude Bibeau, who formerly worked at CIDA, is “one of the first times we’ve seen a minister of international development who actually has a background in international development,” said Julie Delahanty, executive director of Oxfam Canada.

The new ministers won’t want for warnings or advice.

Ottawa’s McLeod Group, promoting human rights, equality and sustainable development, estimates that more than a billion people live in abject poverty.

Countries simply can’t develop if their people are hungry, sick and uneducated, it says. Poverty discourages investment, results in political instability, violence and conflict, is a breeding ground for pandemic and increasingly unmanageable population shifts, exacerbates international environmental problems, and can spawn and nurture terrorism.

So ending poverty is no mere act of charity, but is in the “long-term self-interest” of Canada and the developed world.

Some foreign aid players hope to see Canada bump Overseas Development Aid funding to 0.34 per cent of Gross National Income in the new government’s first budget. But no one expects them to reach the oft-stated goal of 0.7 per cent overnight.

“We’d like to see the government providing a 10-year plan for how they’re going to increase ODA to 0.7,” Delahanty said.

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Stephen Brown, a University of Ottawa political science professor, has written in the Star that Canada should also uncouple aid from Canadian commercial interests to focus on poverty and inequality and must also re-engage with NGO partners.

The prospect of a more collaborative approach gladdens aid agencies.

“We have the practical knowledge and the relationships within country to really inform — from an evidence-based perspective — what can work,” said Cicely McWilliam of Save the Children Canada.

Gillian Barth, president of CARE Canada, said: “We have a country full of amazing experts in a wide variety of areas, and I think those experts were one of the best-kept secrets in Canada.”

Correction - January 4, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version that misspelled Julie Delahanty's surname.

