The single woman entrepreneur operating a start-up business in a remote village of Bangladesh is just as important as the large multinational company employing hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. CIDA works with both to help alleviate poverty in the developing world. Our government will continue to be there when humanitarian crises strikes the globe's most vulnerable. But our long-term goal is to help people help themselves, so that they can move themselves and their families from poverty to prosperity -- a result I believe all Canadians can take pride in.

Canada received a scolding from its peers Tuesday, with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) saying the government doesn'...