Global Affairs spending
What Canada sends abroad as official development assistance — how much, how it splits between country-to-country programs and contributions to multilateral bodies, and how it sits against the economy and against everything else the federal government spends. Figures are the OECD’s, for Canada, in Canadian dollars.
Canadian dollars; B = billions. 2024 is the latest year the OECD has published — 2025 is not out yet, so this page cannot yet show what Canada is spending in the current year. Calendar years.
| Year | Total ODA | Bilateral | Multilateral (derived) | % of GNI | % of federal spending |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | $10.2B | $8.3B | $1.9B | 0.34% | 1.8% |
| 2023 | $10.7B | $8.3B | $2.4B | 0.38% | 2.2% |
| 2022 | $10.2B | $7.6B | $2.6B | 0.37% | 2.3% |
| 2021 | $7.9B | $6.2B | $1.7B | 0.32% | 1.6% |
| 2020 | $6.8B | $5.2B | $1.6B | 0.31% | 1.2% |
| 2019 | $6.3B | $4.3B | $2.0B | 0.27% | 1.8% |
| 2018 | $6.1B | $4.6B | $1.5B | 0.28% | 1.9% |
Bilateral is aid Canada directs to a country or project. Multilateral is shown as total minus bilateral — money pooled in bodies such as the World Bank or UN agencies, where a Canadian dollar cannot be traced to a project. It is derived here, not an OECD line. Only years where the OECD publishes the total, the bilateral part and the share of GNI together are shown (2018 onward); earlier years use a different method and are not spliced on.
About $1.81 of every $100. Each square is $5.
Official assistance ($10.2B) divided by federal expenses from the Debt tracker. The two come from different statistical systems (OECD and Statistics Canada), so the ratio is approximate. Assistance that is counted but spent inside Canada — such as some first-year refugee support, which the OECD’s rules count as aid — is part of the total.
Global Affairs Canada itself signed 3,875 supplier contracts in 2025 worth $0.4B at signing (federal contracts by department, from Gov Watch). That is what the department bought to run itself — it is not the aid above, which flows mostly as grants and contributions that the contract file does not cover.
Which countries receive the aid, and loans to Ukraine versus grants, are not shown. The OECD’s by-recipient table is published in US dollars with coded recipients, and no Canadian-dollar recipient series is loaded, so nothing is estimated in its place.