OTTAWA—There’s one celebrity who is not swooning over Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Irish musician and international aid activist Bob Geldof criticized Trudeau’s statement that spending 0.7 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product on foreign aid is “too ambitious” at this time.

“It seems very unambitious for a man as ambitious as Trudeau to limit that,” Geldof said, chiding Trudeau for comments made Monday in an exclusive interview with the Star.

Speaking to reporters in Montreal after his speech to a convention of international investors where he urged greater investment in Africa, Geldof addressed Trudeau: “Your economy is more than capable. You promised to do it and it’s really not up to the prime minister of any country to reverse the promise the people made, is it?”

Geldof said it was Canada that first proposed the 0.7 per cent target in 1969 but never reached it.

“You guys invented it and you should be the ones living up to it,” he said.

It was a reference to the UN expert commission headed by former Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson, which set the spending target as a goal for rich countries to spend to aid development in poorer countries.

The international community has embraced the goal many times, as have the Canadian Commons standing committees on foreign affairs, and on human rights and international development — in 2002, 2003 and 2005. In February 2005, the leaders of the three opposition parties in the House of Commons wrote a letter to then-prime minister Paul Martin urging him to set a “clear and mandated” timetable to reach the goal. That year’s G8 summit leaders committed to doubling aid to Africa — a goal that Martin’s successor, Stephen Harper, hit before freezing aid spending in a bid to rein in the deficit.

Canada has never hit the larger 0.7 target, though it reached a high in foreign aid spending of 0.5 per cent of GDP in 1986-87.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Canada spent 0.28 per cent in 2015, up slightly from the previous years, but below the average of 0.30 per cent of all 28 countries that the OECD ranked.

Trudeau’s government has made a modest increase to foreign aid spending, choosing instead to spend billions more on child benefits, infrastructure, and aboriginal communities.

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With files from The Canadian Press

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