In some instances, although a given federal entity is supposed to provide service in French, in light of the small French-language population base... The thresholds are often set at 5% or 20% of the population, percentages that we could never reach in Newfoundland and Labrador. In other words, there are nation-wide official languages programs that could never be run in Newfoundland and Labrador. Nevertheless, I would like to draw your attention to a success story. It concerns a pilot project that Service Canada launched in the Stephenville-Port-au-Port region. Although there are francophone communities in the region, they are not sufficient in number to meet the five or 20% threshold. By converting to an traveling service, they were able to be classified in a region with a higher percentage of French-speaking persons.
The Stephenville office now has a staff member who works two or three days a week in the Grand'Terre and Cap St. George region, which is around an hour's drive from Stephenville. This is the sort of flexibility I was talking about earlier; it allows us to run programs in special circumstances, such as those found in Newfoundland and Labrador.