All true (and similar for Edmonton) but not totally unrelated. There’s a bit of a province-wide liquor shortage because every drop of legal alcohol in Alberta goes through some distributor in St Albert (just north of Edmonton) that’s recently found itself chronically understaffed. Every employer in the province is finding itself chronically understaffed because of the huge amount of oil money flowing around. It’s impossible to keep workers now because everybody knows they can behave abominably and not lose sleep over it because tomorrow they can walk across the street and get another job for $2/hour more. The crazy amount of oil money has led to some bizarre Albertan development strategy of building massive, sprawling cities with an intensive core and a mammoth periphery. It’s feasible because most people can afford to drive for an hour and a half to get to work every day, but that also means our cities have constant traffic jams and a dearth of sufficient parking for everybody’s Escalade. Finally, the taxi situation is in large part due to extremely poor planning on the part of our provincial leaders ten years ago. The sentiment in Edmonton is that if they’d bothered to invest any money at all in public transportation, it would be feasible now for people to take a bus or LRT or C-Train home at night after going to the bar, but now the cost of labour is so expensive that it’s going to take a lot longer to build up that infrastructure and in the meantime, we’re all taking taxis home and the taxi companies are making a killing off of it. They don’t want to increase competition because prices would drop, losing the company money and making it harder on drivers who already pay a huge amount to own a taxi…

It all comes back to our black, gooey national treasure.

Though the previous comment is correct, these problems in Calgary are not totally unbearable.
It might be hard to find a certain brand of your favourite alcohol once in a while, but everything else will be in stock. As for taxis, the night rush isn’t great, but calling ahead helps, and there are companies that drive those drinking home for free. The rest of the time taxis shouldn’t be difficult to get a hold of.
Parking downtown during the day is honestly horrible. I’ve seen places advertising at $15 for an hour and a half, and thats if you can find a parking spot within a couple miles of your destination. Your best bet is parking at the C Train station and taking it down through the free zone to wherever you are going.

I was in Calgary this weekend (Labor Day ‘09) and had no trouble finding cabs. But that’s as a tourist, not as someone looking to get home after a night on the town. That could easily be another story.