How one of our Calgary lawyers spent forty-five years building a city from boardrooms, lacrosse benches, and behind a pancake griddle.
If you’re a Calgary local, you may recognize John Tyrrell from the Stampede grounds. He is the one on the microphone at the Entertainment Stage, working a crowd that turned up for a free breakfast and stayed for the show.
Or maybe you recognize him from the lacrosse rink? Probably managing a team of teenagers.
Or perhaps from twenty-five straight seasons at the scorer’s table at the Calgary Roughnecks games.
You have almost certainly met his work even without ever meeting him. His mark is there on Memorial Drive where medallions set into the pathway open up more than a century of Calgary’s military history on your phone.
And if you run a business in Alberta, you may know him from an entirely different room: across a table, working through the sale of a company you spent thirty years building.
John has been with us since 2013. At this point it should be a surprise to no one that he joined us to help Caravel expand our operations into Alberta because everything John does is underscored by a love for his home.
He was once our lone wolf lawyer operating out of Calgary. Now, over ten years later, he has a team of 15 out there with him thanks to the groundwork he was integral in laying.
A city you choose
John did not grow up in Calgary. He took his law degree at the University of Manitoba and built his career out west, and like a lot of people who end up there, he found a city he wanted to help build.
“Calgary is a city with a strong volunteer ethos, and nothing says Calgary community like the Calgary Stampede.”
A few years after arriving, acquaintances already involved with the Stampede asked whether he wanted in. His answer, in his own words:
“I jumped in with both boots.”
That was thirty-five years ago. He is still there. That is jumping in with both boots, alright.
John volunteers with the Caravan Committee of the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede, whose job is to take the Stampede off the grounds and into the neighbourhoods. In practice that means the Pancake Breakfasts, staged at malls across Calgary and the surrounding areas through the ten days and all year round, to the tune of more than 150,000 pancakes annually. The Committee has also run breakfasts across North America, Asia and Europe; John travelled with them to Hong Kong in 2002 for Chinese New Year, promoting the Stampede and celebrating the Year of the Horse.
Calgary is a big, fast-growing city. A breakfast in a mall parking lot is the mechanism by which such a place gets to feel like a neighbourhood for an hour on a Tuesday morning. The pancakes are the allure, but the point is that several thousand strangers are welcomed into a simple but impactful ritual. That is civic infrastructure, and it is built entirely by people who volunteered to build it.
The same instinct, on the clock
Pancakes are generally more enticing than contract negotiations, but still, we can’t neglect John’s day job.
Calgary’s economy is, although in part a story about head offices, strongly driven by owner-managed and employee-owned businesses, founders, families, and the companies that employ people down the street from where they live. John has become a partner to many of those businesses, seeing them through their growth, much as he has done for the entirety of the city.
He advises those businesses on the things that determine whether they survive a hard year or a big transition: how the entity is formed, how the contracts are written, what happens when the founder wants out, how a reorganization is structured, how someone is hired well and let go properly. Before Caravel he was at Borden Ladner Gervais LLP, Milner Fenerty (now Dentons Canada LLP), and The Forzani Group, so he has seen these moments from inside a national firm, inside a growing company, and from the client’s side of the table.
It is the same job as the pancake line, really. Show up for the people trying to build something, and the city gets better.
Building things meant to outlast you
The pancakes aren’t the whole story, either.
John has spent twenty-eight years in Calgary lacrosse. It started with his three sons and spiralled into a passion of his own, he has since been a coach, a team manager, a Club President, a Provincial Director and a League Discipline Chair (a lawyer chairing discipline hearings for a contact sport being a casting decision that writes itself). He now manages a Junior B Tier team of young men aged sixteen to twenty-one alongside two of his sons who coach the team, and is celebrating his 25th season of scorekeeping for the Calgary Roughnecks of the National Lacrosse League.
And for roughly forty-five years, since a senior partner at the firm where he articled (a retired Major General of the Canadian Reserves) noticed his interest in Canadian military history and started bringing him along, he has supported Calgary’s military community. As Vice Chair of Calgary Salutes he has led lecture series on Canadian military history, essay writing contests for Calgary high schoolers, the addition of an Afghanistan plaque to the Calgary Cenotaph, and the five-kilometer interactive walkway on Memorial Drive where QR codes at thirty-one medallions open up more than a hundred military stories.
The overlap
We asked John whether there was any unexpected connection between the volunteering and the law. He did not hesitate:
“Volunteering is about giving back, making things better without necessarily receiving anything in return. Practising law is about going beyond and making things better as well.”
And when we asked for one line on why he does it:
“I have been given many opportunities and therefore contributing to the common good and “giving back” to the community is my way of saying thank you for those opportunities.”
Why Caravel?
“Caravel has given me the flexibility to practice law and yet have time to embrace the passions and projects I have outside the practice.”
John has spent forty-five years building Calgary. Some of it from a boardroom, some of it from a scorer’s table, some of it from behind a griddle. The part about this that continues to wow those who have known John through it all? He has never really treated those as different jobs.
John’s practice
John works with owner-managed and employee-owned businesses on:
- Corporate and commercial law and business entity formation
- Employment and HR matters, including hiring and terminations
- M&A, amalgamations and divestitures – buying and selling businesses, both shares and assets
- Commercial contracts – drafting, review, revision and negotiation
- Corporate reorganizations and restructuring
- Leasing, refinancing, and corporate policies and practices
Interested in working with John? Get in touch.
Interested in a practice that leaves room for the rest of your life? We’re hiring.