The government was very intent on ensuring that across departments and agencies there was a very clear focus on outcomes for Canadians, that we weren't simply thinking about activity, about creating a new program that would appear to respond to a need, but where it would actually be difficult to track results in the actual benefit to Canadians.
The Prime Minister and the government are really quite intent on ensuring that as we're allocating results to new purposes, we try to identify, indeed, at the outset what it is we're trying to accomplish, what variables we could use, what data we could rely upon to see whether we're making a difference, how we track that, and how we report on that to the government, to Parliament, and to the Canadian public, so that the action of the government becomes more concrete in terms of how it is affecting individual Canadians.
In order to drive that, it was decided to establish this unit in the Privy Council Office. One of my colleagues testified before this committee and said there had always been in the Treasury Board Secretariat an effort to identify results and to find some metrics.
The difference, in this case, is that those conversations not only engage officers at Treasury Board and program officers in individual departments but they are also actually engaging the ministers and the Prime Minister in some detailed conversation about what it is exactly we're trying to accomplish through certain initiatives. That's the result the delivery unit is trying to permeate across government.