I can only make one comment, actually, about the attempts to find savings, in terms of our own involvement at the Public Service Commission. Our involvement is not that great, but in the effort to find savings, every department and agency was reviewed, and there was a discussion about what could be saved. That included the Public Service Commission.
At the end of the day, we were tasked with new responsibilities and not given any money. We had to find the savings to take on these new responsibilities—that was the management of an enlarged priority system, which everyone didn't want us to delegate, and we had talked about delegating it—which we did. We ended up with a reallocation of over $4 million, I believe, as a result of it. But there was no money taken out of the Public Service Commission; it was all reallocation within.
In terms of how you find efficiencies, one of my priorities at the Public Service Commission is to try to have it become a model organization for how you manage well and properly in the Government of Canada. I can mention some of the things we are doing to try to identify efficiencies within our own organization.
We have been actively involved in benchmarking. We have, with some others, had consultants benchmark our activities with others in town and with private sector databases to see whether we could find savings. Were we more efficient? Were we more costly? In those areas where we found we were spending more than the average, we have undertaken further detailed reviews to identify and to bring it into line or explain why we have the difference.
The other thing we are doing is very aggressively budgeting, with a results focus, tying in human resource management. We're trying to bring these things together and are forcing reallocations. Areas that are less efficient are going to have money withdrawn and put into places where there is shortage. We've been going at that for the last couple of years and have reallocated over $6 million.
My staff is getting tired of hearing me talk about other things I would like to see, such as time reporting, service standards, activity-based costing. We're working on these so that we can get a better handle on what the effort is and how we should do it.
But I'm speaking about our organization and what we're trying to do.