The government has said that aid for the world's poorest is going to be 'secondary' at the G20 meetings next week.

Read more at the Ottawa Citizen "Aid to poor 'secondary': Harper aide"

Clearly we need to put more pressure on the government to help the worlds' poorest.

It's strange that the government is backtracking now, as just a little over two weeks earlier, all the parties in Parliament - including the Conservatives -  agreed that the G20 should address the needs of the world's poorest.

Congratulations to our American cousins on their choice of Barack Obama as President of the USA. Our partner campaign in the US, the ONE campaign, interviewed all the presidential candidates long before the party candidates were chosen.

So we have three videos of Barack Obama answering questions on what his administration would do about poverty overseas. It makes for really interesting viewing, and begs the question "What is our newly-elected Prime Minister planning to do?"

Thirty eight days ago we set out to make poverty an election issue in this campaign, and we met with some success.

The following points were the highlights of the campaign for us, times when Canadian voters and politicians heard about poverty issues in Canada and around the world, and worked to do something to make poverty history.

We asked all the five major party leaders what they would do about poverty, in Canada and overseas. All of them except Conservative leader Stephen Harper agreed to answer our questions about their plans to fight poverty.

Watch the leaders' videotaped answers at makepovertyhistory/ontherecord

Take Action: Ask Stephen Harper what his party plans to do to fight poverty

Prime Minister Harper was presented with thousands of wishes from Canadians today, as he prepared to leave for the G8 meeting in Japan.

The wishes were collected online by Make Poverty History and our allies at Oxfam, and presented at the Prime Ministers' Ottawa office shortly after noon today.

G8 leaders around the world were presented with wishes by their citizens, in an action coordinated by the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP).