I see, yes. It wasn't 6.5%, but we were required to transfer $133,000 and $225,000, for a total of $358,000, for savings. One amount--$133,000--went to the census, and for procurement savings there was $225,000. There was a requirement to do that.
With respect to the general question that is being asked, there is no doubt that the Public Service Commission is facing significant financial pressures. When I talk about sunsetting money, this is the money we had for our electronic system, so this is the system for all Canadians to be able to apply to jobs, and the electronic screening behind that. We have since managed to fund that within the government, so government departments are paying for the utilization of that system.
There are significant pressures, because we are in cost recovery, for parts of our services. As staffing services go down, we have issues in terms of being sure that we can cover those costs. It means that as an organization, we have to manage our books and start the year with significant reserves. So it really requires quite a bit of tight financial planning on our part.
We had strategic review cuts. We've done the second year. We have one more year of cuts, in the order of $4.3 million that we had to take out of the budget, out of the base. In addition to that, we have an operating budget freeze, which we estimate will take about $1.3 million out of the base every year—this past year and for the next two years. So we have these ongoing reductions.
I'm not unique; the same thing is happening in other government departments. To this point, I think we can manage them, so we are doing a number of things. We are tightly managing our new staffing, so as people leave we are tightly managing the replacement of the new staff. My executive committee is actually reviewing all new staffing requests. We have regular reports on where we are in the budgets, and we have a lot of discussions on what the priorities are.
As well, we are looking to improve the efficiencies of our operations, and fortunately we have been able to get the money for the IT infrastructure we need. But the consequence of that will be that as we replace some staff and not others, we are going to have some people in the wrong spots. So we are making sure we will have money to do training to help reallocate people.
As I said in my opening statement, on the HR side this means more than ever that public service managers will have to manage, and manage very well and very tightly. It is true on the financial side. As I think many members of this committee know, I spent many years in the Office of the Auditor General, so I'm preoccupied with both the financial and the HR side of this. I think as an organization, we are managing.