One of the things that we have here.... I mentioned the idea that you have program tagging. This is something that we made a big hoopla about last year when we presented to the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance. We showed this new tool. What you have is this whole mix of programs. This speaks to one of the nice changes that was brought about by the policy on results.
Previously, you had a lot of detailed information that was siloed in all the individual departmental reports. If someone came in, for example, and said, “I want to create the virtual department of clean drinking water so that I can understand what the government is doing to ensure that all Canadians have access to clean drinking water”, that person would have had the joyous task of opening 80 or 90 reports and one for each year. That person would have had to go through and ask, “Is this a program related to this? Is this a program...?” It's very manual and very error prone.
What we're doing to change that under the new policy is we're bringing all this low-level information to one place. We let someone come in and say, “I want to just kind of subdivide the world this way. I want to use this tagging scheme to pull together programs.”
What we currently have here are four ways of reassembling the government into different collections of programs. The first two are the classic ones. We have appropriated federal organizations by ministerial portfolio and by just an A to Z listing, so that's not particularly interesting. Then we have two of these new tagging things. We have what we do. We kind of reassemble the government based on....
Here, I'll turn this on instead of talking about it. I showed this before in terms of that bar graph. We have economic affairs and social affairs. What you can do, though, is drill in and see under economic affairs the following activities: employment and income security.
If you open that up, you get a description of what that is, and you see all of the programs that contribute to that particular area. If you want, you can click and see an infographic. You can see that this is the historical and planned spending for this particular sub-area. We've taken all the programs under that tag, and we've reassembled them into a pretend department of employment and income security.
We'll be adding to this over the course of the year. We're going to be adding another tagging scheme: client groups. I mentioned this before. If you want to see all the programs that support seniors, if you want to see all the programs that support youth, that's going to be there.
One of the challenges with some of these tagging schemes is what's called double counting. If we go back out—and that sounds ominous, but it's not—we have this thing called “How we help”. This is a tagging scheme where we show the different ways in which a program delivers its service. Is it a program with service for Canadians? Is it a transfer payment?
Some programs deliver their services through multiple channels. Some programs support more than one client group. You might have a program that supports both aboriginal and employers or something. If you were to add up all the programs under there, it might look like we're saying that the government is actually spending three times the amount. This is why we have these warnings that say that this is a tagging scheme where programs have been tagged with more than one particular tag. We're showing the up-to amount. This is the largest amount of money that's being spent for youth, for example. These are all the programs that have been tagged as supporting youth, but they do other things as well. They might also be supporting seniors. You would see some other spending there.