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Calgary seems to violate every one of those principles. With no natural barriers - no lake like Toronto's, no mountains and sea as in Vancouver - Canada's fourth-biggest city sprawls north, south, east and west across the rolling foothills of southern Alberta.

Density is low. With the same-sized footprint as the five boroughs of New York, Calgary has one-10th the population.

his own immigrant neighbourhood of Coral Springs in the city's northeast, the proportion of non-white residents has soared to 82 per cent from 50 per cent a few years ago, while in the southern half of Calgary, he says, all but 8 per cent are white.

three-point plan.

First, develop unused downtown lands. Calgary has a bustling downtown with thickets of office towers, including the rising Norman Foster-designed skyscraper the Bow. But there is a lot of barren, underused space in between. Mr. Nenshi has high hopes for the East Village, a once-sketchy area that is to be revived with a new music centre and housing projects.

Second, encourage "spot intensification" of residential neighbourhoods. A recent study showed that 80 per cent of neighbourhoods were actually losing population density as householders saw their children grow up and move out. He would like to see developers build high-rises around transit stops and redevelop low-rise strip malls into mid-rise retail and residential buildings.

Third, build smarter suburbs. That means more subdivisions with a mix of housing types - single-family, townhouse, apartment block - in place of uniform tracts of identical, knock-off houses. He points to the success of Garrison Woods, a new neighbourhood on former military lands with double the density of a traditional suburb. The developer designed it to be walkable, with shops and schools nearby.

Mr. Nenshi wants to charge developers higher fees for building on the city's edges, arguing that the city effectively subsidizes suburban development by charging too little to supply infrastructure and services.

It's not that he wants to abolish suburbs. "We have to recognize that a lot of people want to live in them," he says. "I'm not interested in forcing everybody to live in a high-rise building downtown. This isn't Hong Kong." He just wants the price of a place in the suburbs to reflect the true cost of putting it there.

When did Jane Jacobs write The Death and Life of Great American Cities? We're getting there, just 40 years later," Mr. Nenshi says.

When a project called Imagine Calgary asked residents what they wanted from their city in the future, it found that most wanted to live in a place where they could walk to the store, walk their kids to school, get by with only one car and be surrounded by different kinds of people.

If everyone wants that, why aren't we building that?" the mayor says.

Gibbons also says that with a labour shortage coming to Alberta in roughly 18 months, it's not a good time to tick off city staff. "They're happy right now."

The city also has a sterling reputation as a centre for higher education and the sciences, including an excellent, internationally recognized university, which includes a worldrenowned nanotechnology institute, and a smaller, newly named university -MacEwan -whose reputation is growing.

The result will be more people outside of the city centre during working hours, people who return to suburbia afterwards.

describing her community, Hanrahan painted a picture familiar to Albertans. Gainesville is an inland medium-sized centricity with a large university, surrounded by agriculture and forests. Coal fuels most of their electricity production. While Gainesville has a (much!) warmer climate than Alberta's cities, it only has about a seven per cent better solar resource for generating electricity than Edmonton does.

Gainesville's feed-in tariff guarantees a payment for 20 years for electricity fed back to the grid, set at a rate that will allow owners to recover their costs and obtain a four to five per cent rate of return. To control costs, the program is capped so that contracts are only available for four megawatts of new installed capacity each year. The first 4 MW has cost the average resident about 70¢ per month. As installation costs quickly decrease with a new, robust local solar market, future phases will cost even less.

the political obstacles are less daunting at the municipal level.

In Edmonton, high school graduation rates stood at almost 73 per cent for the 2005-06 school year, according to numbers provided to the district by the province.

While much attention has been given to the province's hot labour market, which can lure teenagers out of the classroom, Telfer said the province has also emphasized the importance of meeting students' emotional needs and re-evaluating programs to make them more relevant for students.

A shrinking labour market will drive up costs and make the industry less competitive, said Gary Leach, executive director of the Small Explorers and Producers Association of Canada.

"If you don't have trained workers in key choke points, and we're already seeing that, it's going to affect the development of all sorts of big projects," Leach said.

Hiring temporary foreign workers has crossed her mind, but the thought of looking into the process overwhelms her. “It seems to have a lot of government red tape. We’ve all got so much on our plates right now, we’re all maxed out.”

Adding to that is the fact that hiring temporary foreign workers is inherently a short-term solution for a problem that has far-reaching effects. Even if the construction boom tapers off after 2010, the baby boomers will still be in retiring, and Canadians still won’t be making more babies, so it seems inevitable that the issue of worker shortages will keep arising

ratio of residents aged 65 and over to those of traditional working age (18–64) will rise from 20 per cent in 2006 to 46 per cent in 2050.

report by the Canadian Bar Association says temporary foreign workers are not meeting the needs of labour-hungry employers, because time is spent getting the person trained on the job, particularly where safety is concerned, and just when they are up to speed, employers have to start all over again with new workers.

Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) President Gil McGowan says the AFL supports more permanent immigration to Canada. “Bringing in temporary workers, who are very vulnerable to abuse and exploitation is no solution,”

“Immigration policy should be about building a stronger society, not about importing cheap labour to serve the short-term needs of employers.”

Canadian Construction Association (CCA) is advocating for an expanded temporary foreign workers program for the construction industry, it also recognizes it can’t be the sole solution.

labour crisis has been like a mirror held up to the immigration system, reflecting its many flaws. Thanks to the shortsighted “points” system to immigration sales offices that falsely “recruit” immigrant professionals (see Publisher’s Note on page 3), the Canadian immigration system has lost sight of what Canada needs, how Canada works, and how to make immigration policies sophisticated and flexible enough to reflect these things.

In B.C., the provincial government is trying to do its part to fill its labour gap, partly by subsidizing the new Skills Connect for Immigrants programs that help skilled immigrants enter positions equivalent to their qualifications in such hot industries as construction, transportation, energy and tourism.

Six service providers have been chosen to administer the program, including ASPECT, Back in Motion, Camosun College, Douglas College, Multicultural Helping House Society and Surrey Delta Immigrant Services Society (SDISS).

“If immigrants move to B.C. to work in a field where there is a shortage, then we need to help them get their training and credentials recognized [through these programs],” says Minister of Economic Development Colin Hansen

Number 1 is career assessment, which includes credential and language evaluations. Number 2 is skills enhancement services. “For example, if a participant wants to go into CAD construction and wants to top up his training, we can help arrange that,” she says. Number 3 is a workplace practicum, which allows them to get a little Canadian experience.

“Although it’s not the end focus of our Arrive B.C. program, the largest gap is labourers,”

Proactive Personnel (www.proactivepersonnel.ca).