I would say a couple of things. The first is that there is a Treasury Board policy. It's called MRRS, but for today's purposes it's around performance reporting. It requires each department to outline the performance objectives and how they will measure those for each program they have. That's point one: to get Treasury Board approval of a program, you have to be able to explain what the objectives are and how they will be measured.
Point two is that there is also a requirement that all programs be evaluated every five years. An evaluation will look objectively at the results of the program and offer up some analysis of whether the results are being achieved. Those evaluations are made public. When each department finishes its evaluations, the results are posted on the departmental website.
The final piece of the puzzle would be in each department's report on plans and priorities and follow-up departmental performance reports. In those you will get a sense of what the program has actually done. The really key question for me, when there is an evaluation, is, what does it say?
That's the policy framework to make sure that there's value for money. If you look at the fairly recent expenditure reduction exercises, going back a few years we had strategic reviews. They were very much focused—and the government was in surplus when they started—on the question of whether we were getting value for money for the programs. The reductions that were made were for cases in which there was no federal role or in which we were not getting good value for money or something along those lines.
We borrowed those concepts when we did the strategic and operating review, but we brought in operations as well.
Those are the key things we do to look at programs.