Prime Minister Stephen Harper won’t be remembered as Canada’s most generous leader when it comes to helping the world’s poorest countries. That honour goes to Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney, who earmarked 0.53 per cent of our national economic output for foreign aid in 1975, and 0.5 per cent in 1986.

Last year Canada’s $5.7-billion official development assistance, which the Conservatives have boosted by about $1 billion since 2006, was more like 0.32 per cent of gross national income. And critics say some of it is being used to support the Tory trade agenda.

Yet even so, Harper deserves credit for investing in one area that is close to his heart: better global health. Under his direction Canada is plowing $2.85 billion over five years from 2010 to 2015 into the Muskoka Initiative to improve mother, newborn and child health care. Collectively, global donors have pledged $40 billion to the same ends. Canada’s contribution is almost twice what we might normally have been expected to provide.

Within that initiative Ottawa has just earmarked $650 million over three years for the Global Fund to combat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. That’s a welcome 20-per-cent increase. These three afflictions still kill millions every year. The fund aims to raise $15 billion for the next three years and here, too, Ottawa has ponied up more than its share.

That strong support has helped the United Nations make “remarkable progress” toward meeting the 2000 Millennium Development Goals to ease extreme poverty, disease and hunger.

Through the Global Fund and allied programs, the tuberculosis mortality rate has been almost halved. A third of the people in low-income countries who need HIV/AIDS treatment are now getting it. And half the families in Africa who live in malarial areas have access to medicines and anti-mosquito netting. Millions of lives have been saved, lengthened and made healthier.

Bill Gates, the philanthropist founder of Microsoft and driving force behind the Global Fund, calls it “one of the smartest investments the world has ever made.” Christian Paradis, Canada’s international development minister, points out that “a window … now exists to reduce the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria to a point where they are no longer public health threats” in poor countries. A decade ago that would have been a visionary hope, nothing more.

Today, thanks to ambitious efforts by Canada, the United States and other donors, that hope is closer to being a reality.

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