This is what we call the national area of selection. The Public Service Employment Act has a provision that allows the Public Service Commission, and anyone we delegate, to limit the geographic area where people can come from to apply for a certain job.
Members of Parliament, by and large, have been very upset about that. I've given up trying to defend it and have decided that we will change the system. We are doing this gradually, because we have high volume. People are very interested in getting work in the public service, particularly people outside of this area. So when we expand the geographic area, the volume we get increases dramatically. There are hundreds and hundreds of applications that we have to manage fairly.
It's very important to us that we get the tools for people in the system to use, because we want the system to be fair and transparent. We have started to incrementally provide the tools. Right now we have broadened the area of selection to national for all officer jobs in the national capital area. All executive jobs have been national for a number of years, but now all officer jobs in the national capital area are national. We are doing evaluations of this to see how it's going. We don't want work-arounds either; the system is good at doing that. We're putting the tools in place, making them available to people.
We have two pilots in the regions, because our intention is to expand the officer jobs to all the regions by April 2007. So all federal jobs, regardless of where they are, will be national. Then we'd like to move it more broadly to other support functions at the end of 2007, if we have all the systems in place and they're working properly.