I've just had a job offer in North Vancouver, and have been told that this makes immigration much quicker and smoother. My husband, so I've been told, will get a visa off the back of mine so to speak. He is currently a Landscape gardener in UK, but fancies a change.

Has anyone got any similar experience, and how easy is it to find a job, if you want to try something new, once you get out there. Failing that, are there a lot of gardening jobs going!!! Can you recommend anywhere to start looking. He'll probably also need to be part-time as we have two kids to work around!

Have a look into the job bank link or the North Van. local gardening
centers on the Yellow Pages below.

http://www.jobbank.gc.ca/JobResult_e...ent&Student=No
OR
http://yellowpages.ca/search/?stype=...2Cbc&x=30&y=16
Yoong

How do you as parents currently handle the child care situation? When your work as a nurse prevents you from looking after your children after school, who looks after them? Does your husband play Mr. Mom at those times? If so, does he presently work part-time in order to accommodate your work schedule?

If you and your husband want an arrangement like that when you move to BC, you might want to think about some sort of business that your husband could run from home. But I guess it depends what services he is qualified to sell. We don't know him, so we don't know if he knows anything about computers or whatever.

If your husband works around your shift work, which presumably would change from time to time, it would make him an unreliable and sporadically available employee. If he wanted to work for someone else on that basis here in Calgary, I think he would be able to find only relatively unskilled and quite poorly paid work.

Even if he wanted to work for someone else as a landscape gardener, I don't think it would be feasible for him to request part-time hours, and ever changing part-time hours at that. From what I've seen of landscape gardeners in Calgary, they work long hours. They have to take advantage of good weather when it strikes and stuff like that.

I've never lived in the UK, so I don't know how long children's school holidays are, what time they finish school in the afternoons, etc.

Here in Canada, children typically are off school for the whole of July and August. They also get a two-week holiday around Christmas / New Year and a ten-day holiday in the spring. They got off school around mid afternoon. Sports are not arranged through the school, but rather by parent volunteers working through community associations and the like. Parents volunteer as coaches and, at a minimum, have to take their turns at carpooling kids to practices and games in the afternoons / evenings and weekends. In any given academic year, there also are several days when schools are shut for teachers' professional development days (when teachers attend professional development workshops or going skiing, depending on whom you believe).

When both parents work outside the home, they usually pay for before and after school programs at daycare centres, summer camps, etc.

Then, of course, they have to make special arrangements when their children are ill and cannot attend daycare.

Frankly, it can be tough.

These are some of the things I think it would be useful to think about in advance.

Anyway, I have too little information about your husband's skills and interests and about your overall situation to be able to make any more suggestions.