Now you're getting to the really tricky part. Your question is anticipating my next comment a bit.
In the past—and we're in a transition now—there was a restriction. There was an ability to restrict the geographic area of competition. So any public service manager could decide to allow jobs, if there was one in Ottawa, only from Ottawa-Gatineau, for example, or if it was in Toronto, from only around Toronto. This has raised a lot of concerns, particularly from members of Parliament, who saw a lot of jobs come up that were advertised for outside the public service but restricted geographically. So that meant that their constituents couldn't apply for those jobs.
We had always done that to limit the volume of applicants, because in the public service we have a lot of people interested in the generalist jobs. We have hundreds of applications. For the specialty jobs, it's a different situation. For specialty jobs, we have to compete with everyone else, and we often don't do so well. So specialty jobs are not the same as the generalist jobs.
We have now initiated a process and changed our policy by broadening it. Starting April 1, all jobs for what we're calling the officer level are now open to national competition, so anyone in the country can apply for those jobs. Two things have had to happen with that. One is we are putting in information systems that will allow us to deal with the large volumes of applications. That is now all in place; we're beginning to roll this out.
Your second part of the question is what the costs are. This is a bit unknown, because this is now at the discretion of the managers, as to what they're paying for this. We are providing facilities and support, so that you can do interviews in other ways apart from having people come directly. But there is discretion as to whether you pay moving and relocation costs. That's one part of the cost equation.
The second part of the cost equation is we have to put the information systems in place, so that when people apply their application gets treated and they get treated in as fair a way as everyone else.