According to the OECD, Canada’s total official development assistance (ODA) (USD 7.8 billion, preliminary data) increased in 2022 due to exceptional support to Ukraine and its pandemic response in developing countries, increased costs for in-donor refugees as well as higher contributions to international organizations, representing 0.37% of gross national income (GNI).

[6] During and after World War I, Canada assumed greater control over its foreign relations, with its full autonomy in this field confirmed by the Statute of Westminster in 1931.

This was followed in 1982 by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's decision to combine External Affairs and International Trade into a single department.

[10] The 1982 merger was part of larger reorganization of government that also combined the Industry component of ITC with the Department of Regional Economic Expansion.

However, legislation to formally abolish DFAIT and provide a statutory basis for the separate departments failed to pass a first vote in the House of Commons on 15 February 2005.

In 2013, included within the Conservative government's omnibus budget bill, An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 21, 2013 and other measures (Bill C-60), was a section that would fold CIDA into the department, creating the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD).

GAC is headquartered in the Lester B. Pearson Building at 125 Sussex Drive on the banks of the Rideau River in Ottawa, but operates out of several properties in Canada's National Capital Region.

At the time that the external affairs portfolio was created in 1909, Canada was a self-governing dominion in the British Empire and did not have an independent foreign policy.

Implicitly, since the department was responsible for affairs with both Commonwealth and non-Commonwealth countries, all external relations were of a type, even when the head of state was shared with other nations.

Canadian interests outside the empire (e.g. between Canada and its non-empire neighbours, the United States, Russia, St. Pierre and Miquelon, and Greenland) were under the purview of the UK Foreign Office.

[27] The Statute of Westminster clarified that Canada (and certain other dominions, such as Australia and New Zealand) were primarily responsible for, among other things, the conduct of their own foreign affairs.

After World War II, Canada was a founding member of the United Nations and participant in its own right in post-war settlement talks and other international fora, and in most respects the conduct of foreign affairs was no longer colonial.

Nonetheless, by the time the change in terminology was effected in 1993, Canada's foreign affairs had been conducted separately from the United Kingdom in most significant respects for the entire post-war period, or over 60 years since the Statute of Westminster.