At the end of this month, there will be a change in the services offered in certain community offices located in Newfoundland and Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. Until now, services were delivered by third parties. We had contracts with certain organizations in these communities and information on the programs and services offered by the Government of Canada was provided in these offices. They are community offices, not regular Service Canada offices.
After having evaluated the services delivered by these offices, we realized that it was not the same as services offered elsewhere. Elsewhere, not only can you receive information on programs and services, but you can also, for example, apply for a Social Insurance Number and receive it immediately. In these community offices, this is not possible, because the employees are third parties working on a contract basis.
What we intend to do, therefore, is to replace the services offered in these community offices either with access to a regular Service Canada office, if it is less than 50 kilometres away—that is our performance standard—, and to establish what we call a regular outreach site. This would involve having Service Canada employees go from place to place with a laptop and all the programs and equipment they need to deliver services available on site. They would travel to the communities on request. It could be once a week or once every two weeks; it all depends on existing demand. Some of these community offices in Cape Breton serve francophone communities in Nova Scotia...