OKOTOKS, Alta. - When Claire White and her husband saw the old-style main street and picturesque river winding through town, they were struck by how much Okotoks looked like the England they'd left behind.
"We drove down here in the summer -- it was a beautiful sunny day and all the kids were playing in the river and we just fell in love with it,'' said White.
Last year White and her family joined the thousands being drawn to Alberta from the rest of Canada and indeed all over the world by the extended oil and gas boom.
Sensing opportunity, she quickly secured a job in real estate during what has turned out to be one of the wildest times on record for the local and provincial housing markets.
It's no surprise to White that the latest census crowns Okotoks as Canada's second fastest growing community, behind Milton, Ont. Figures released Tuesday by Statistics Canada show the scenic little town has exploded by 46.7 per cent since the last census count five years ago. Okotoks is now home to 17,145 people, a huge increase from the 11,689 people who lived there in 2001, the last time the census was taken.
Property values, which used to be a bargain compared to the sprawling suburbs of Calgary some 18 kilometres north, have doubled in the last four years.
The cheapest single-family home available recently was a 1,000-square-foot fixer-upper described as a "cute cottage'' with no garage and an unfinished basement for $299,900.
White says the market is expected to grow a further 15 per cent this year, and others agree that there's no sign of slowdown on the horizon.
"Okotoks is going to rage on for two or three more years,'' says Paul Rockley, publisher of the local Western Wheel newspaper.
"There's good and bad that come with it, for sure,'' says Rockley, whose grown children want to stay in town but can't afford a starter home.
The developers can't keep up. They built more than 700 homes in Okotoks last year -- about the same number as the city of Lethbridge to the south, which is five times bigger.
The Okotoks story is similar to that in many Alberta communities. The province recorded nearly 49,000 housing starts last year, outpacing Quebec despite having less than half the population.
Alberta's overall population has swollen 10.6 per cent since the 2001 census. Calgary's population grew by an average 13.4 per cent over the last five years, and Edmonton was the fourth fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country at 10.4 per cent.
Three of Canada's 10 fastest growing communities are in Alberta: Okotoks, Airdrie and Grande Prairie.
What is remarkably different in Okotoks is the lightning speed by which it is being transformed from sleepy bedroom community to bustling town.
The fire department lost five of its volunteer firefighters when Calgary went on a major recruitment drive earlier this year to shore up its own over-stretched force.
Fire chief Paul Kaiser says he can't blame anyone who leaves for full-time work elsewhere, especially when his volunteers are being asked to work up to 10 shifts and 80 hours per month."They've all got young families and are all involved (in the community), so it's an awful lot extra that we're asking,'' says Kaiser.
There are other nagging byproducts of growth. Rush-hour lineups to get over the town's only bridge have started to resemble the nightmarish traffic snarls that were thought to be the purview of much bigger cities.
Downtown is enduring breathtaking change at breakneck speed. Local mom-and-pop shops have withered as Wal-Mart, Starbucks and other chain stores spring up.
"You're losing some of the small-business flavour,'' says Aaron Brown, owner of main street's new San Carlos Caffee, one of the town's first fully independent coffee houses.
"But out of that came a new type of business -- and I'm one of them. There's an opportunity here to do something a little different.''
The explosive expansion is also threatening Okotoks' groundbreaking sustainability plan, which puts limits on the municipal boundary and caps population size at 30,000.
"Those things are all up in the air now,'' says Mayor Bill McAlpine.
Thickets of new estate homes in the surrounding rural municipality are now tapping into the same fragile water source that caused Okotoks to get ahead of the curve in drafting the plan nine years ago.
The town's stated goals of expanding in an "environmentally, economically, socially and fiscally healthy way'' are all being strained -- and fast.
"It's a struggle to maintain the focus that we need to maintain if we're going to attain this sustainability level,'' says McGrath.
Craig Wright, chief economist with the Royal Bank of Canada, expects Alberta to continue leading the country's growth. But he says increasing costs brought on by market forces will eventually create a natural slowdown.
"People in the past looked here and said, `Job opportunities are great.' Now they look here and say, `Job opportunities are great, but the cost of living there is a little less attractive than it was last year or the year before that.''
Wright said other provinces will also begin to draw back some of the migrating population through lower taxes and other initiatives.
Alberta's new premier, Ed Stelmach, has promised a plan to cope with the growth but is already warning that the long list of necessary infrastructure projects won't all go ahead.
It will also take a while for political representation in Ottawa to catch up to the population growth. Every second census is used to redraw electoral boundaries, so it could be up to 10 years before more Alberta seats are created in the House of Commons.
"This will not do anything politically except possibly fuel the fans of Western alienation because of heightened expectations that people get about what our population increase can do,'' says Faron Ellis, a political scientist at Lethbridge Community College.
And Ellis says the fact that most new immigrants settle in southern Ontario means Alberta will never be able to catch up in population to Central Canada.
"Albertans or westerners who think that demography is going to solve their disadvantaged position within the federation are going to be in for a long, long let-down.''
