Canada made the biggest monetary cut to foreign aid of any country in 2013, marking a four-year national low, an international report pointed out this week.

The trend is “particularly concerning” given Canada’s record as a “strong aid champion” in the past, says the One Campaign’s 2014 Data Report.

“We’ve been a bit disappointed,” said Tom Hart, the North American executive director of the One Campaign, an organization co-founded by singer Bono 10 years ago to advocate for ending extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa.

“Canada is one of a handful of countries this year that has seen a decrease.”

Internationally, spending on development reached a new high in 2013 — $134.8 billion — according to a second report released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) this week. It pegged Canada’s cut at 11.4 per cent — the second biggest proportional cut after Portugal, which was responding to the conditions of an economic bailout package.

The reports did not surprise Canadian aid workers, who have braced for bad news since the federal government announced a plan to cut $380 million in 2012.

But it did come as Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird called on Canadians to join the fight against terrorists in Iraq. “My Canada protects the vulnerable,” he said in the House of Commons this week.

“My Canada does not leave all the heavy lifting to others.”

“We have a moral imperative for bombing, but not so much for helping the poor,” said Stephen Brown, a political science professor at the University of Ottawa and editor of Struggling for Effectiveness: CIDA and Canadian Foreign Aid.

Julia Sanchez, the president of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation, said Canada’s recent record puts the country in a weak position next year, when the world’s countries gather to set the global development goals for the next 15 years.

“If we don’t do our bit as a donor country, it’s very hard to have any sway,” she said.

There was a silver lining. The One Campaign report did commend Canada for focusing 43 per cent of the aid money it does spend on sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to one-third of the world’s “extreme poor.” And an OECD senior policy analyst said Canada’s aid has become more focused and transparent since 2012, when it was last reviewed.

“Canada’s performance as a donor is good in many respects,” said Rahul Molhotra.

He, too, urged the country to boost its aid commitment to reach the global donor target of 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI). That was set in 1969 by a United Nations expert commission headed by Lester B. Pearson. Despite its Canadian impetus, we have never reached that benchmark. In 2013, Canada’s aid spending sunk to 0.27 of GNI — below the international average of .29, according to the One Report, which does not include debt relief in its calculations.

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Britain reached the 0.7 goal for first time in 2013 when it poured an additional $3.95 billion into aid. It joins Denmark, Luxembourg, Sweden and Norway.

Responding last May to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s urging that Canada reach the 0.7 target, Prime Minister Harper responded: “It’s the philosophy of our government and, I believe, of Canadians more broadly that we do not measure things in terms of the amount of money we spend, but in terms of the results we achieve.”