John Day

John Day is a leading lawyer and a real estate developer and investor whose projects have revitalized neighbourhoods throughout Edmonton and Jasper. As board chair of numerous organizations, he has played a key role in expanding educational institutions, raising money for medical research and attracting millions of dollars in investments to Alberta.

John Reginald Day was born in Sheffield, England on July 14, 1950. His father, Dr. Jack Day, was obtaining post-graduate training in obstetrics in England at the time and returned to his Edmonton hometown soon after with his wife, 2 daughters and young son. Dr. Day was a medical doctor with an entrepreneurial spirt. In the 1960s, he and 7 other doctors purchased the Lobstick Hotel in Jasper and formed Mountain Park Lodges, which would become Jasper’s predominant hotel company.

John would succeed Jean Forest as Chair of the Board of this enterprise upon her appointment to the Senate. He moved the company on fast forward and purchased many quintessential Jasper hotels: Marmot Lodge, Chateau Jasper, Pocahontas Cabins, Pyramid Lake Lodge and a controlling interest in the Sawridge Inn. John later joined up with other Jasper hoteliers to purchase shares in the Marmot Basin Ski Resort and Jasper Tramway. It can be said that Jasper has its own special Edmonton bond, and that can be attributed to Edmontonians like John, his father and his partners.

John describes himself as an unremarkable child who showed few signs of the lawyer, businessman and developer he would eventually become. He earned a BA in political science in 1971 and his law degree in 1974, both at the University of Alberta. He joined the law firm now known as DLA Piper as a young lawyer, and 22 years later joined the law firm now known as Dentons, retiring in 1990 and having earned a King’s Counsel designation.

During his legal career, John contributed to the community by chairing several committees as a member of the Edmonton Economic Development Authority and serving on the Edmonton’s Air Services Authority.

But it was not until he was well into his legal career that John branched out as a businessman. “I handled a lot of commercial real estate transactions for clients,” he says, “and I thought, ‘Well, I could do some of that myself.’ So, I started to do small things, and it grew from there.”

John and a partner purchased and tore down the Cecil Hotel in downtown Edmonton in the late 1990s. The old hotel had become an eyesore and created an unsafe atmosphere for pedestrians. He envisioned a new commercial building that reflected the history of Jasper Avenue and the old Birks building standing just across the street. This revamp was central to the revitalization of 104 Street into a walkable streetscape with shops and an outdoor market. It became a downtown destination and invited other developers to build residential high-rises in the area.

John performed a similar transformation on the Garneau Theatre. The historic building had previously been occupied by a small chain of arthouse movie theatres, but now was sitting empty, its burnt-out marquee a sad reminder of its glory days.

“I grew up on the south side,” John says, “and I’d been going to that theatre ever since I was a little kid, and I wanted to see it preserved.” He arranged to restore the marquee and the distinctive neon “GARNEAU” sign, hammered out a deal that made the nonprofit Metro Cinema Society its new tenants, and opened up the ground floor of the building complex to locally owned businesses. The revamped Garneau was designated a Municipal Historic Resource in 2009.

Other showpiece renovation and reclamation projects followed, including the old HUB Cigar Building on Whyte Avenue and the century-old building just down the street popularly known as the “Uncle Albert’s Building,” which burned down in 2003. John is probably most noted for the iconic rebuilding of the former Kelly-Ramsey Building in downtown Edmonton, which reopened as the 25-storey Enbridge Centre in 2009, the first new office tower in the city’s financial district in nearly three decades. In a nod to the building’s past, parts of its original brick structure were painstakingly taken down, cleaned and reassembled into the new building’s four-storey façade.

John’s development projects have been recognized numerous times at the City of Edmonton Urban Design Awards: the Cecil Place development won an Award of Merit in 2007, and his refurbishment of the Enbridge Centre won the Award of Excellence for Heritage and the Award of Merit (Civic Design) in 2017. He was named one of Alberta’s 50 Most Influential People in 2010.

In 2010, John was named Chair of the Board of Governors of MacEwan University. He was initially reluctant to accept the job, unsure what value he could add to the institution, but he became intrigued by MacEwan’s desire to “reshape their real estate footprint in Edmonton.” At the time, MacEwan’s campus was spread across three complexes at inconvenient locations and were expensive to operate.

With John as chair, the board made the bold decision to sell off MacEwan’s Southside and West End campuses as part of an overarching plan to centre the campus around a single downtown location. The board also adopted John’s ambitious vision for a new arts complex. Some members felt it would be more prudent to opt for a less expensive three-storey building, but once again, John’s eye was trained further into the future. John convinced them to build a five-storey building — emphasizing that the additional cost would be a fraction of what it would take to add a new building later on.

“I believed MacEwan was a growing institution,” he says. “If you only build to the size you need right now, by the time you’re finished you’ll be too small. Growth is happening, growth is coming.” MacEwan credits the new Allard Hall as a key reason for the surge in student population that the university enjoyed in the 2010s. John believes the proposed School of Business building, for which he is currently helping raise funds, will support further growth at MacEwan and in downtown Edmonton.

More chairmanships followed. In 2018, John became the founding chair of Edmonton Global, a coalition of 15 municipalities in the capital region, designed to grow the regional economy. With member communities of wildly varying populations and levels of development to keep satisfied, it took all of John’s board management skills to hold the group together. But they were soon delivering tangible results, such as the launch of the Alberta Hydrogen Initiative and the Polykar manufacturing facility.

John served two terms as board chair of the Royal Alexandra Hospital Foundation and was a fundraising co-chair of the Edmonton Men’s Health Initiative, which established the C.J. Wood Centre, an international leader in prostate cancer research and treatment.

In honour of his late wife Cecilia Johnstone, he established 2 student endowment funds at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Law, as well as a separate endowment fund promoting education and research into the treatment of cervical cancer.

Despite admitting that he is no athlete, John agreed to chair the Organizing Committee that brought the World Triathlon Championship Finals to Edmonton in 2021. Again, this assignment required a deft leader, stickhandling the complex challenge of holding an international sporting event during COVID.

In the wake of the 2024 Jasper wildfire that destroyed many homes and businesses, and as the longtime chair of Mountain Park Lodges and Marmot Basin, John was one of the people the town immediately looked to for leadership. He speaks with admiration about the many grassroots efforts that sprang up to manage the aftermath, but he did his part as well. He joined a new group of business leaders, the Jasper Owners Committee, which hired consultants to study the situation and work with various levels of government to help Jasper residents and business owners secure assistance.

John is the father of 3 children and is married to Margaret Bateman. He continues to run his real estate development business and, while he is not actively looking for new chairmanships, they do have a way of finding him. “I would almost never lobby for something,” he says. “People would just call me out of the blue and say, ‘How’d you like to do this?’ I often said 'Yes' because I get so much energy and enjoyment out of working with other people and I’ve been lucky to work with the best. Someone could always call me up tomorrow. There’s always the chance of finding some irresistible new project to take on.”