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“Canada is back, my friends” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau famously declared at the Paris Climate Summit back in November, 2015, just weeks after having routed Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in a federal election campaign that ended the Liberal Party’s 10-year interregnum on the Opposition benches in Ottawa. “We’re here to help.”

A year later, Trudeau struck the same triumphalist tone in his maiden speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, concluding with almost exactly the same line: “We’re Canadian. And we’re here to help.”

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As things have turned out, Canada is indeed back again, and we’re helping the UN meet its lofty obligations where it really matters, with pretty much the same gusto as Canadian governments have always managed to muster. Which really isn’t all that much.

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By 2014, in the final throes of the five-year spending freeze Prime Minister Stephen Harper had imposed on his ministers in response to the global financial meltdown’s challenge to solvency and good government, Canada’s overall foreign aid spending had shrunk to about 0.24 per cent of gross national income. By last week, when the Trudeau government unveiled its ambitious $650 million International Women’s Day foreign aid reorientation to the purpose of sexual and reproductive health rights, much attention was focused on the new strategy’s dedication to fighting for abortion-rights, worldwide. It was almost a footnote, as the New Democrats’ Hélène Laverdière pointed out, that Canada’s overall foreign aid spending had again fallen to 0.26 per cent of gross national income.