Edmonton Economic Development Corporation

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.

Attracting more international students to Ontario’s universities has many benefits for our schools and our economy. However, in strict financial terms; while the institutions have the incentive to attract international undergraduate students, they do not have the incentive to attract international graduate students. If Ontario is to pursue the worthwhile objective of attracting more international students, we need to think through the financial incentives carefully.

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

Bews estimates that 10 per cent of Calgary employees are working outside the normal office environment one day or more a week.

"The biggest obstacle to this is middle management and there's a tendency to still feel like 'if I can't see someone, it means they're not working'," said Bews. "So those are certainly the people that we're working with.

Bews said Calgary is growing. There is an increase in urbanization. Commuting to work is taking longer. Gas is getting more expensive. Technology is getting better.

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."

As the economy begins to click into second gear, employers are hiring but they are doing so with extreme caution. They will only hire individuals who have the exact specificity of skills they are looking for,"

There need to be changes to the permanent residency act in order to allow TFWs to gain permanent residency more easily.

Temporary Foreign Workers have outpaced permanent immigration.  There are more TFWs then new permanent immigrants arriving in Canada.

Temporary Foreign Workers have little or no advocacy available.

recommendations

Amend the Fair Trade Act and pressure the Federal Government to Tighten Legislation.

Move away from Temporary Foreign Work and toward Permanent Residency.

Human Rights Protection for Everyone

Immigration Programs must follow a human rights framework.

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.

lmost one in seven companies can’t find enough uneducated, non-experienced people.

Canadian businesses, both large and small, are lobbying Ottawa hard to increase its immigration numbers above the current rate of more than 280,000 per year.

federal government, with one ear on these urgent business needs and another on a Conservative rank-and-file who aren’t keen on immigration, is striking a compromise by keeping the numbers more or less steady.

German government recently concluded that its shortfall of immigrant workers is costing the economy 20 billion euros a year, leading to a strong push from business to push immigration above its current level of 600,000 per year, even though there are officially 3 million jobless Germans (or 6.6 per cent).

Raising pay in sectors with shortages would encourage people to get the needed education to work there, it would encourage older workers to stay on longer and it would encourage foreign workers with the right skills to move” to your country,

high-unemployment regions are physically far from the labour-shortage regions, and poorer people tend to be rooted in the places they grew up. Welfare changes provide a one-time fix; after that, the shortages often return.

United States, despite its paltry welfare programs, will still be short 35 million workers by 2030; Europe, despite its generous decent minimum wages, will need 80 million. The most direct and politically feasible solution, the one most governments will continue to use to square the circle and fill the hole, will remain immigration.

Sloppers are those that move things—from one side of a store or factory to another. Amazon is displacing thousands of retail workers. DMV employees and so many other government workers move information from one side of a counter to another without adding any value. Such sloppers are easy to purge with clever code.

Sponges are those who earned their jobs by passing a test meant to limit supply. According to this newspaper, 23% of U.S. workers now need a state license.

Supersloppers mark up prices based on some marketing or branding gimmick, not true economic value.

Slimers are those that work in finance and on Wall Street. They provide the grease that lubricates the gears of the economy.

Thieves have a government mandate to make good money and a franchise that could disappear with the stroke of a pen.

Like it or not, we are at the beginning of a decades-long trend. Beyond the demise of toll takers and stock traders, watch enrollment dwindle in law schools and medical schools. Watch the divergence in stock performance between companies that actually create and those that are in transition—just look at Apple, Netflix and Google over the last five years as compared to retailers and media.

this economy is incredibly dynamic, and there is no quick fix for job creation when so much technology-driven job destruction is taking place. Fortunately, history shows that labor-saving machines haven't decreased overall employment even when they have made certain jobs obsolete. Ultimately the economic growth created by new jobs always overwhelms the drag from jobs destroyed—if policy makers let it happen.

Economic Developers of AlbertaContribution: $36,500Projects: Analysis, training and website upgrades

if it's an overall indication of where the federal government is going with immigration visas then certainly we would object to that," said Heidi Harris, a spokeswoman for Alberta's Road Builders and Heavy Construction Association.

"We have an aging work force. We have more people retiring and leaving the workforce than we have coming in."

Ontario's Immigration Minister Eric Hoskins also said the drop in skilled workers could harm the province's economy. He said Ontario will ask Ottawa to reverse the decision as the province negotiates a new immigration agreement this month.

"I would say that the growth of Ontario's economy is dependent upon the arrival of talented new Canadians who can come to this province and put their skills to work for our economy.