When this initiative was launched, two things happened. The Treasury Board Secretariat set the expenditure base for each department. That's important because we excluded certain things from the base. For instance, major transfers to Canadians and the provinces were off the table, so they couldn't cut those. The logic is you can only cut what's in your base.
We also said to departments that at least a proportional share of their savings had to be operating efficiencies. They could not achieve their target simply by eliminating one big program.
When we communicated each spending base to each department, we were able to say, “Here's your grants and contributions portion. Here's your operating portion. A proportional share of your 5% and 10% spending reduction options has to come from operating.” I can tell you that every single department came forward with proposals that had at least a proportional share from operating. They did all respect that guideline.
Those were the guidelines that were set.