Thank you very much.
That's a good question.
Considering that public distrust of government institutions is increasing in Canada, and elsewhere in the west and in the rest of the world, it's obvious that the government needs to be more efficient. In fact, more and more of our fellow citizens believe that when it comes to government services, they're not getting their money's worth.
I think the government needs to be as efficient as possible if it wants taxpayers to trust its institutions. There are many ways to get there. The Prime Minister gave me a mandate, which I share with the President of the Treasury Board and the Minister of Finance and National Revenue. I see two ways of fulfilling that mandate, which is a collective effort. First, departments need to do a vertical review. All departments more or less began that process when they were asked to review their spending. They were asked to find ways to gain efficiencies within their respective organizations. That's the vertical part.
I work a lot with Shared Services Canada and Treasury Board, among others, to make sure we have tools, including the AI technologies a number of departments are using. I'm thinking, for example, of the translation tool developed by the translation bureau.
I'd like to give you some numbers to make this more concrete. The translation bureau recently created and deployed the tool, and it was implemented in five organizations this past June, namely Canadian Heritage, the Privy Council, the Department of Finance, the RCMP and my department, Public Services and Procurement Canada, or PSPC.
Since June, 95 million words have been translated using the tool. It is estimated that 465 million words will be translated within those five organizations and one other one.
Translation costs in the private sector vary between 15¢ and 40¢ a word. At the translation bureau, the cost is between 35¢ and 40¢ a word. Thanks to the tool, that cost drops to one cent a word. It allows translators, who do phenomenal work, to be a lot more efficient, since they just have to revise documents that have largely been translated.
You can imagine the efficiency and speed that can be gained by developing such a tool. Many of our colleagues in Parliament would like to have access to it to translate documents, and we're working on that. The results are very positive thus far.
That's just one example. There are many other tools that can be developed and deployed within government.