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Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has made relief and reconstruction for Haiti a major cause for his government, will travel to the earthquake-ravaged nation on Monday to see the recovery efforts firsthand.

His visit comes as international efforts to aid Haiti, still struggling to provide basics like food and shelter and sweep rubble from roads, increasingly look ahead to the task of rebuilding the poorest nation in the Americas almost from scratch.

Mr. Harper, who a month ago ordered Canada's largest-ever emergency mission into the Caribbean nation, will visit the capital of Port-au-Prince and travel to the town of Jacmel, a hard-hit area where Canadian troops have led relief efforts.

There are now about 2,000 Canadian troops in Haiti. A strip west and south of the capital around Jacmel and the town of Léogane, the epicentre of the 7.0 magnitude quake that struck Jan. 12, has effectively become Canada's relief zone. Canadian troops expect to have distributed nearly a million meals by the time Mr. Harper departs on Tuesday.

The swift dispatch of the Canadian military's relief efforts – the first aid planes landed arrived 36 hours after the quake as two navy ships sailed – was remarkable for a country that has in recent years faced criticism for the slow pace of its emergency response.

But the troops are slated to return to Canada some time in March, and efforts will turn to the decade-long task of rebuilding Haiti, as donor nations convene at the UN in New York for a conference on reconstruction March 22 and 23.

The United Nations' emergency relief co-ordinator, John Holmes, said Haiti's immediate needs are still humanitarian relief, including the need for shelter ahead of the approaching rainy season, but it is time to think ahead to reconstruction.

“We're working as much as we can to make sure whatever we're doing on the emergency side … fits in properly with what needs to follow,” he said in a press briefing from Port-au-Prince.

The real scale of a disaster that killed more than 200,000 is still being revealed now, he said. Refugees from Port-au-Prince are straining food supplies in a country where the normal food distribution system has broken down; a huge number of buildings were levelled by the earthquake, but many more are so unsafe they will have to be demolished.

“There will need to be a lot of destruction before there can be reconstruction,” he said.

Mr. Harper will not be the first foreign leader to visit Haiti since the earthquake – the president of the neighbouring Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernandez, visited two days after the earthquake, followed by leaders of Jamaica and Ecuador – but he will be the first from one of Haiti's major aid donors.

For Mr. Harper, Haiti has become a foreign-aid priority unlike any other in his four years in power.

More aid has flowed to Afghanistan, hand-in-hand with Canada's NATO military mission. But from the hours after the earthquake hit, Mr. Harper tied his political identity to a humanitarian mission as never before.

After dispatching troops, the government convened a preliminary donors' conference in Montreal, where nations agreed they will have to commit 10 years of efforts to reconstruction in Haiti – a country where the international community's record of start-and-stop commitment has been notorious.

Canada's ties to Haiti owe much to Governor General Michaëlle Jean, whose family roots are in Jacmel – among those killed in the earthquake was the godmother to her daughter. In addition, Montreal is home to a large Haitian diaspora.

Those links combined with Mr. Harper's desire to make the Americas a focus of his foreign policy and the palpable reaction of Canadians to the horror of the earthquake to make Haiti a focal point for Ottawa's aid in future years.

Haiti was already Canada's second-largest recipient of aid – the Canadian International Development Agency pledged $159-million last year – but Mr. Harper said at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that is “only going to get bigger in the future.”

Canada has so far pledged $135-million in emergency aid to Haiti, and promised to match donations made by individuals before Friday night. At last count, on Thursday night, Canadians had donated $145-million to 14 charities, of which $124-million was eligible for matching funds from Ottawa.