A survey by Manpower Inc. found that Edmonton's net employment is anticipated to grow by 48 per cent, compared to thenational net employmentoutlook of 29 per cent.

The red-hot job market across the nation leaves Edmonton, Alberta clamoring to find the right people.

The province's hiring targets are choked by labour shortages and it's becoming "more and more difficult to find staff with the needed education and skill sets", explains Dan Luft at Manpower's Edmonton office. Luft wants the federal government to streamline immigration for people who could fill vacant positions. Interprovincial migration won't suffice because the job market is "pretty healthy across Canada," Luft said.

Danae Vanderveer, the general manager at a local Boston Pizza, believes that finding employees has reached a desperate state. "It's bad and then some. We maybe see one application a week," she reveals. Vanderveer finally turned to immigration as a solution. She allayed her dire staffing problems by bringing workers in from tsunami-devastated Sri Lanka.

The Canadian immigration consultant helping Vanderveer said the last time she was in the Sri Lanka to recruit workers she had 200 in cooks alone lined up outside her office. While 200 seems like a lot of people, it doesn't even cover half the demand of Boston Pizza in just the area around Edmonton and Fort McMurray alone, where 500 cooks are needed.

For Vanderveer, the stress of running a restaurant in Edmonton without sufficient numbers of employees is reaching nauseating extremes, "It's impossible to run a business in this town," she complains.