I can say, Mr. Chairman, that our department has gone through two rounds of seeking efficiencies, initially through strategic review in 2010, where we reduced overall expenditures by 5%, and in the second round of the deficit reduction action plan, where we also found another 5% in operational efficiencies. Part of this was facilitated through greater operational efficiency and better use of technology.
As I've said to this committee before, a decade ago, even five years ago, our department was operating in almost a 1980s world in terms of technology, with a huge number of paper-based applications.
Think about this. Every time a member of Parliament put in a request to one of our embassies for a status report on an application, an officer would have to get up from their desk, go down into the basement, wheel through huge stacks of files, go in and find a paper application, bring it out, go back to their desk, open it up, and review it—taking 15 or 20 minutes just to check the status of an application. Now, with GCMS, they can, in principle, do it instantly online. If you multiply that by tens of thousands of files, you can see the efficiencies that we're realizing by applying new IT. That means we can make more decisions in less time at lower cost.