In a season of big decisions, the Trudeau government will soon make a far-reaching international policy choice most Canadians probably don’t even know about. They will set the terms for a new long-term international assistance strategy, triggered by the first formal review of Canada’s programs in more than 20 years. As always with such decisions, budgets will speak louder than words. The government has a once-per-generation chance to do right by both Canada and the world.

What does the term “international assistance” even mean? Many humanitarian emergencies certainly require assistance around the world. But the more pivotal global issue is the large-scale public investment required to promote the economic and environmental progress that limits the risk of such emergencies in the first place — many of which spill quickly across borders to our own doorstep.

As the Conservative former U.K. cabinet minister Andrew Mitchell recently pointed out to Canadians, global development budgets are an investment in domestic security and stability. We all depend on every country’s health system to keep emergent diseases like the Zika virus at bay, its governance system to provide a sense of justice and opportunity for young people, and its environmental management system to limit pollutants that otherwise pour into our atmosphere and oceans.

Unfortunately, for a generation, Canada’s international budgets have been like slow-sailing supertankers in search of navigational co-ordinates. Fiscal commitments tend to be benchmarked against previous years’ outlays, rather than the mix of resources required to meet specific global challenges. The result is an intergenerationally regressive approach. Even though average incomes have grown by around 40 per cent since 1990, Canada now allocates around 40 per cent less of its income to global development.

Charting a new course hinges on three interconnected steps.

First, the government needs to set a budget ramp through to 2030, the deadline for the sustainable development goals. These are the time-bound economic, social and environmental targets that all countries agreed to last year, and which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has strongly endorsed. Any Canadian budget end point less than 0.7 per cent of national income, the international standard of decency already met by countries such as the U.K. and Norway, will disappoint the majority of UN member states.

It will also be a factor in a few years when Canada comes up against Norway for a UN Security Council seat. Importantly, an all-party Canadian parliamentary committee recently cleared the domestic political path with a recommendation to achieve the 0.7 target by 2030.

Second, the government needs to align its international investments with its commitment to domestic prosperity. One simple solution is for increases in international assistance to be conditional on expanding the national economic pie. Under conservative growth assumptions for Canada’s $2 trillion economy, allocating only two cents out of every dollar of growth brings the country to the 0.7 standard within a decade. If Canada dips in to recession, international increments can be paused until growth resumes.

Third, Canadians need to hear a clear case for what their hard-earned tax dollars will contribute globally. One breakthrough option aligns fully with the government’s priorities: skills and opportunity for young people, especially girls. Little of that can be achieved without adequate investments in education.

The latest estimates suggest a global education financing gap of roughly $40 billion per year — less than one-tenth of a per cent of advanced economies’ annual incomes. Canada could commit to fund one out of every 10 new international dollars toward filling this gap, while convening the practical problem-solving to ensure multilateral institutions, national programs, and other key actors do their part to achieve universal secondary education by 2030. If tied to the crucial “future job skills” agenda at home, the 2018 Canada-hosted G7 summit could serve as a natural first deadline for the effort.

The government’s choices on this file will have major consequences for Canada’s role in the world. So far Prime Minister Trudeau and his team have enjoyed tremendous success, with few exceptions, in positioning Canada as “back” on the global stage. Now it’s simply time to align the resources with the ambition.

John McArthur is a Senior Fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development program.

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