Chapter Five 87

in their position - were able to get a small bilingual Government Service Office, which functions as a sub- branch of the Regional Services Centre in Wellington, the biggest community in the Acadian region. Beginning with little more than a secretary and an almost empty room, it developed rapidly, and soon began to provide a wide variety of information as well as a reasonable number of government services; for instance, the Member of Parliament, the Member of the Legislative Assembly, a Housing Officer, and a Youth Employment Officer regularly hold office hours in the Centre.

Although the calls and visits in English greatly exceed those in French, the Centre has contributed much to the independence of Tignish and the survival of the Acadians by making so many services and so much information available in the community in both official languages.

Tignish was the only part of the Island which developed a whole new group of co—ops in the seventies. Those who formed the committees, made the decisions, and organized the work chose to use a co—op as a framework for their project for a pragmatic reason; this was how new organizations were set up in Tignish. It was also considerably less complicated and expensive to charter a co-op than any other kind of business. Many of the same people were involved with all of them ; although the maiority of residents of the Tignish area were happy to go along with the co—op way of doing things, the number of actively involved co—operators was relatively small. These co—operators were middle—aged or young; they had spent all or most of their lives as members of the Credit Union, the Co-op Association, and (in some cases) Tignish Fisheries. Most of them were from the