Thank you for the question.
Some of you will know that over the past couple of years we have gone through several deficit reduction efforts.
First, in our strategic review, as all departments did in 2011, PCO did theirs then. Then in 2012 we did the same thing in the deficit reduction action plan.
Some of you are new to this committee and so you may not know that at PCO we have no programs. We are all people, so we don't have any programs to cut, and that meant we had to find efficiencies. We did that through three main themes. We did that through business transformation, where the Privy Council Office adopted new and innovative ways of doing business. We realized savings by taking advantage of technology and finding less labour-intensive ways of doing our work. Examples of that would be how we manage our cabinet document system, library services, the paper record centres. As we move to digitization, we have fewer stacks of paper records that we have to worry about.
As I said in my opening remarks, in intergovernmental affairs we also realigned our capacity to match the change in government demand. Where we used to put a lot of effort in one area, we were able to realize that actually government's priorities had shifted and we were able to realize some savings in that regard. Then, obviously, there were other discrete initiatives.
You're right. The workload has not changed, but how we do our work is different. An example of that would be how we approach intergovernmental affairs. We used to have a discrete secretariat at the Privy Council Office that was headed by a deputy minister. Then we realized that, particularly in Canada, being cognizant of federal-provincial-territorial relationships really permeates every file that we do. That's something that all analyses of the Privy Council Office should take account of. So we decided to embed that horizontally. We still kept a centre of excellence in one of our secretariats, and that's in the plans and consultations and intergovernmental affairs secretariat. They provide expert policy advice, but it is the responsibility of all program analysts now to be cognizant of federal-provincial-territorial relations. So, rather than having a whole organization dedicated to that, we have a small centre of excellence and we have made our analysts more polyvalent, if you will.