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Lafarge also reaches out to university graduates for long-term succession planning, visiting campuses across the west to raise awareness of career pathways within what has traditionally been seen as the male-dominated industry of building materials.

Diversity is another large component to its succession plans.

Too often, large corporate divisions develop succession plans in silos, making it difficult to align workforce needs into the bigger entity's long-term HR strategy

process of allocating nominations to employers before they select individual nominees disadvantages workers in at least two ways. First, it further discourages workers from accessing existing employment protections such as minimum employment standards in the face of employer abuses, by giving employers sole discretion to “reward” workers with nominations. Given that these nominations represent a direct path to permanent residence status in Canada, they are obviously extremely valuable to workers. As Yessy Byl, the Alberta Federation of Labour’s Temporary Foreign Worker Advocate, points out, some employers “use this program as a further excuse to exploit workers who desperately want to immigrate.

Many dangle the possibility of nomination in the AINP to ensure acquiescence to unreasonable requests such as unpaid work, additional work, etc.”[xcvi] Second, by limiting the number of allocations made to each employer, this system is likely to increase competition among workers for nominations and may even discourage employers from participating in the nominee program altogether because they regard it as arbitrary and unfair.

MPNP requires employers to notify temporary foreign workers, within their initial six months of work, that the employer intends to nominate them through the MPNP. This requirement has the advantage of minimizing worker uncertainty about their future status while they are still ineligible for nomination under provincial requirements.

further reform might be for the province to remove the six-month work requirement, making foreign workers eligible for nomination as soon as they begin work in Canada. This would at least provide the opportunity to do away with the temporary “trial period”, during which workers are arguably most vulnerable. Such a reform, however, may also serve to increase employer control ever further and calls into question the overall legitimacy of a program that gives private actors such broad scope to nominate immigrants without even basic requirements to prove their bona fides. Realistically, these challenges point to the inherent inadequacy of the TFWPs as an entry point for permanent economic immigration through an employer-driven nominee program. Palliative reforms that fail to recognize underlying problems of regulatory devolution and resulting institutional mismatch are unlikely to generate the kinds of outcomes for vulnerable foreign workers that fairness and sound economic policy-making are likely to demand.

employer beliefs that individuals from certain countries of origin are better able to perform this or that job create racialized profiles within particular sectors and industries.

Left to the sole discretion of employers, the effects of nominee selection processes in this area will likely be to ossify and entrench aspects of race and gender discrimination as part of Canada’s economic immigration system.

Employers in Manitoba, for example, have been active both in lobbying for an expanded nominee program and in developing surrounding institutions and services. 

developed a network of services for foreign workers that have been widely hailed as successful innovations – at least in those workplaces and urban environments where workers are able to take advantage of them.

Alberta’s nominee program requires employers to provide workers with in-house language training services or to arrange for provision by a third party. Likewise, the AINP obligates employers in most streams to design an accommodation and settlement plan for nominees that “demonstrate employer support and assistance toward successful integration of the workforce, community and society integration.”[cvi] While these seemingly modest requirements may appear to be positive developments in the direction of improving workers’ security and likelihood of successful settlement, the implied trend is clearly toward the devolution of support services away from the provincial government and toward private actors, the effects of which remain largely unevaluated.

There are two specific criticisms directed at this aspect of regulatory devolution. One is that obliging employers to provide essential settlement services further skews barging power to the disadvantage of workers by enmeshing their personal and family lives even more closely with authoritative decision-making processes undertaken by their employers. Jenna Hennebry has pointed out that:

modify the changes to the way you select economic applicants in the context of improving employment incomes,

Canada's immigration policies have increasingly focused on short-term labour market needs at the expense of longer term nation-building.

as provinces have been given more control over their immigrant intake, a national framework has fallen by the wayside

there is a lack of alignment in the immigration program between skills selection and labour market needs

Canadian Construction Association and Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, the coalition is calling on the government to invest money in colleges—and to fix the immigration system.

by 2012, immigration will account for all labour force growth in Canada, and that two-thirds of the available jobs will require post-secondary education.

We need an overhaul to get more skilled trades into Canada quickly," Mr. Charette said. "When you look at Australia, they can get in in three to four days."

Success Key to Decision

she also said the recent changes brought in by the Conservative government, which give the immigration minister full discretion over how many and what type of immigrants get in, "makes sense." With data that showed economic migrants to Australia were struggling to find work and make a decent wage, the government of the day brought in mandatory language testing and credential assessment for economic migrants before they immigrate.

In Canada, however, English-speaking migration has disappeared, she said, adding that no one has yet been able to explain why.

Australia also made it easier for international students to apply for permanent status and, by 2005, 52 per cent had applied to stay. Not only do these students pay high costs for their education, they "overwhelmingly qualified for positions," Ms. Hawthorne said.

Canada's policies have been focused on increasing temporary workers to meet labour needs, Ms. Hawthorne warned not enough attention has been paid to economic principal applicants in Canada's immigration system.

And that's what's keeping people who are the permanent kind," she said. "This is not removing migration as a source of country building...but you're picking people whose immediate work outcome is much more likely to be positive, and they're equally likely to be diverse, and they'll have better longer-term outcomes, as will their children."

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.

eplaced traditional performance evaluations with a system that emphasized goal-setting and continuous improvement. It encouraged supervisors to act as coaches and mentors, and officers (who are unionized) to offer feedback on their superiors.

Performance reviews aren’t the only ways to measure effectiveness, to be sure. Workers whose output is tangible and measurable — how much garbage is picked up, how many streets are cleared of snow — are increasingly evaluated according to numerical goals. I’d argue these measurements are similarly flawed. Workers are almost always better at coming up with metrics that lead to systemwide gains than bosses alone are. The key to systemwide success (as opposed to individual success) is still employees working together under the leadership of good managers.

performance review makes it nearly impossible to have the kind of trusting relationships in the workplace that make improvement possible.

Medical/Allied Professional Dentist D.D.S., D.M.D., Doctor en Odontologia or Doctor en Cirugia Dental; or state/provincial license Dietitian Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree; or state/provincial license Medical Laboratory Technologist (Canada)/Medical Technologist (Mexico and the United States)6 Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree; or Post-Secondary Diploma or Post-Secondary Certificate, and three years experience Nutritionist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Occupational Therapist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree; or state/provincial license Pharmacist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree; or state/provincial license Physician (teaching or research only) M.D. or Doctor en Medicina; or state/provincial license Physiotherapist/Physical Therapist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree; or state/provincial license Psychologist State/provincial license; or Licenciatura Degree Recreational Therapist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Registered Nurse State/provincial license; or Licenciatura Degree Veterinarian D.V.M., D.M.V. or Doctor en Veterinaria; or state/provincial license

Scientist Agriculturist (including Agronomist) Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Animal Breeder Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Animal Scientist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Apiculturist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Astronomer Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Biochemist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Biologist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Chemist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Dairy Scientist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Entomologist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Epidemiologist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Geneticist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Geologist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Geochemist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Geophysicist (including Oceanographer in Mexico and the United States) Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Horticulturist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Meteorologist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Pharmacologist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Physicist (including Oceanographer in Canada) Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Plant Breeder Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Poultry Scientist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Soil Scientist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Zoologist Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree    

Teacher College Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree Seminary Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree University Baccalaureate or Licenciatura Degree  

Awareness and Education 5. HR Resources Online – This website will have customizeable tools on a wide range of human resource topics, and information about good practices for hiring immigrants. 6. Financial institutions provide information/education to business clients – Financial institutions will provide information to their small business clients at the time when they are most likely to be growing their business.

Communciations & Marketing 7. Corporate call – In these one-on-one visits, employer consultants can assess needs, recommend programs and services, and establish relationships with SMEs. 8. Business and industry associations – These organizations have established relationships and channels of communications with their SME members.

SMEs in our Cities Review a statistical snapshot of a local labour market and the skilled immigrant demographic in these fact sheets (PDF): Fast Facts | Calgary

Key Small Business Statistics – Find statistics about small businesses in Canada from Industry Canada.

Globe and Mail Coverage – Project connects immigrants with small businesses & An eight-point plan to get jobs for immigrants

Between 2000 and 2008, 82.6 per cent of Manitoba nominees remained in the province. That compared to 86 per cent in Saskatchewan, 95.6 per cent in Alberta and 96.4 per cent in British Columbia

Nominees who leave are most likely to move to Alberta, B.C. and Ontario

since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized.

robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.

we need to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line — bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent — aren’t just an outrage; they represent a huge waste of the nation’s human potential.

things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

first category includes millions of the best jobs America has ever seen: high-pay, high-skill jobs in knowledge-based professional and creative fields. Almost a third of American workers now have these kinds of jobs, which pay more than double most manufacturing jobs and which have been rather impervious to unemployment.

When unemployment among production workers climbed to more than 15 percent and surged above 20 percent for construction workers, unemployment among professional, technical and creative workers never got much above five percent.

the second category, which comprises such routine service work as personal care assistants and home health care aids, retail sales clerks, and food preparers -- is not so good. In fact, the pay for these jobs is roughly half that of manufacturing jobs. The result is as simple as it is tragic: a startling bifurcation of the job market and an increasingly unequal and divided society. Once we see this, it becomes clear that neither of the two most commonly cited prescriptions -- the counter-cyclical approach to job creation by boosting investment and demand, or the path of educating more people for higher-paying knowledge-based jobs -- can work.

A successful jobs strategy must focus centrally on upgrading the content and improving the wages of this entire job category. That is what happened a century ago, when public policy shifted to protect workers' rights and line jobs in manufacturing, once considered dirty and dangerous and impossible to upgrade, became high-paid work.

service work and service workers are not just a necessary cost of doing business, part of the overhead, but a potential profit center. Service workers can produce real value and there's no reason that they can't have real careers.

make the upgrading of service jobs a key prong of America's next great job machine.

Most service firms are smaller, mom-and-pop operations. To bring them into the 21stcentury, the administration should develop strategies to help these smaller firms learn the advantages of seeing workers as sources of innovation and productivity gains.

This could be a modest, low cost public-private partnership, involving universities, community colleges, and industry groups, modeled perhaps along the lines of the old Agricultural and Manufacturing Extension programs. The administration should also consider using incentives to encourage companies to upgrade service jobs, which would have the added benefit of improving the overall productivity of the highly fragmented service sector -- the last great frontier of inefficiency in advanced economies -- lifting the productivity of the economy overall, while boosting wages and lifting consumer demand.

This wouldn't come for free. All of us would have to pay a little more to the people who clean our homes, take care of our kids and aging parents, cut our hair, and sell us our clothes. This is exactly what we did a half century ago to spur recovery, when we agreed to pay more to the workers who made our cars and appliances and were building our homes. The costs are so modest and widely spread that they are unlikely to derail any recovery. And the payoffs in terms of productivity gains and increased demand are surely worth it.

The decision to be a non-profit was borne out of the belief that trade organizations (like the Chamber of Commerce) often serve more of a business development function rather than address the needs of the local manufacturing community.

In contrast to government-initiated programs, SFMade emerged from the community, the culmination of a grassroots movement. The group allows that community to reconnect, share resources, receive education and assistance on everything from zoning to sourcing to taxes. In the last year, 128 companies have joined in the belief that they’re better togethe

Sustainability has become a large part of its mission: member companies can post the environmental impacts of their manufacturing processes on the Made in N.Y.C. Web site, with those excelling in greener process and product able to earn a “green apple.” Tying economic growth inextricably to environmental stewardship has so far been a strong strategy.

“Let’s help the public understand what we have,” she continues. “The job potential is huge.”

Mature workers currently account for almost 16 per cent of the labour force.

70.1 per cent of Albertans aged 55-64 are active in the labour force compared to 62.5 per cent of Canadians; and 15.8 per cent of Albertans over age 65 choose to remain in the labour force compared to 11.4 per cent of Canadians.