Features
The Winnipegger who changed the course of Calgary’s history
By IRENA KARSHENBAUM Calgary is not known for saving its heritage buildings — although some impressive exceptions exist — so when on March 15 a local real estate investment company, Strategic Group, that is not in the business of heritage restoration, announced they will be restoring the city’s most significant Art Moderne building, the news came as a welcome surprise.
Work has begun on the 1951 Barron Building, once the epitome of chic, that for the last dozen years had stood empty and its future uncertain.
In 1947, when oil was discovered in Leduc, which is closer to Edmonton than to Calgary, oil companies could have settled in the provincial capital instead they were lured to Calgary, thanks to the daring of J.B. Barron, a Winnipeg-native, who saw that the city desperately needed office space and built Calgary’s first post-WWII high-rise. Named the Mobil Oil Building initially, in honour of its biggest tenant and located at 610 8 Avenue S.W., John Barron, J.B. Barron’s oldest grandson who, at the age of five, broke ground in 1949 for the construction of the building, remembers that his grandfather was thought of as “crazy” at the time because, “the city was never going to move that far west.”
Calgary had been struggling through a depression over the previous 35 years since the economic collapse in 1913, so it was hard for the naysayers to imagine a different future.
Calgary’s rising fortunes had their beginnings in Winnipeg.
Born in 1863, Joseph Samuel Barron arrived in Winnipeg in 1880 from Kiev. In 1887, he married 18-year-old Kiev-native, Elizabeth Belapolsky, and the couple had two sons, J.B. (Jacob Bell), born in 1888 and, Abraham, who followed in 1889.
Not immune to the gold rush fever that had spread across North America, in 1898 J.S. Barron left behind his family in Winnipeg and headed to Dawson City enduring an arduous journey by climbing through the White Pass on foot, carrying his merchandise on his back.
A lucky few struck it rich during the Klondike Gold Rush, which lasted only from 1896 to 1899, but most did not – J.S. Barron among them. In 1899, when gold was found in Nome, Alaska, people abandoned Dawson City to seek their fortunes in Nome. J.S. Barron remained.
Elizabeth waited for her husband to return and finally, in 1902, set out on a difficult journey with her two young sons. They traveled from Winnipeg to Regina to Calgary to Seattle by train, where they boarded a liner that sailed north to Skagway on the coast of Alaska, then by railroad to Whitehorse, where they boarded the Casca sternwheeler, which sailed on the Yukon River, and finally arrived in Dawson City.
J.B. and Abe were the first graduates of Dawson City High School and, in 1905, while the father remained in the Yukon, headed with their mother to the University of Chicago, where they studied law. Elizabeth supported her sons by sewing dresses for Vaudeville and Yiddish Theatre actresses and cooking for them. Following graduation, in 1911, J.B. Barron came to Calgary at the urging of his uncle, Charlie Bell, who had recently built the King George Hotel (demolished in 1978). Elizabeth and Abe arrived in Calgary the following year.
Even though J.S.’s mercantile business burned down three times, he continued to stay in Dawson City. Elizabeth had to brave another journey to Dawson City to coax her husband to return to his family. The parents eventually joined their sons in Calgary in 1913, but Joseph passed away in 1917. Elizabeth survived him until 1941.
In 1914, J. B. Barron married fellow Winnipeg-native Amelia Helman, daughter of Odessa-born John Louis Helman and Esther Helman (née Finkelstein), from Shumsk, Ukraine. The couple had three sons: William, Robert and Richard. A teacher, Amelia served as president of the Calgary Chapter of Hadassah and was instrumental in bringing Goldie Myerson and Eleanor Roosevelt to the city.
In 1915, J.B. Barron became the first Jewish lawyer in Calgary to be admitted to the bar. Abe passed the bar in 1919 and the two brothers started the law firm, Barron & Barron. By acting as the solicitor for the Allen brothers, a Jewish family that had established a national movie theatre chain, in 1923, J.B. acquired the Allen’s Palace Theatre on 8th Avenue and discovered his calling, as theatre impresario.
In 1924, he brought the violinist, Jascha Heifitz, and pianist, Sergei Rachmaninoff, who played to thrilled audiences. In 1926, he hired newly-arrived Leon Asper to serve as the conductor of the Palace Concert Orchestra, along with his wife, Cecilia, who played the piano. He convinced Crimean-born, Grigori Garbovitsky, who had settled in Winnipeg, to move to Calgary, where the violinist and conductor founded the Calgary Symphony Orchestra. In 1928, however, J.B. Barron lost control of the Palace Theatre.
It took him another nine years before he would own another theatre, the Sherman Grand. Located in the 1912 Lougheed Building — built by Senator Sir James Lougheed, the grandfather of Premier Peter Lougheed — he bought the theatre from the Lougheed family, giving them much-needed cash. The Lougheeds, who once entertained European royalty in their mansion but, since the death of the senator, and being lenient about collecting rent from their tenants to help keep their businesses afloat during the Great Depression, were themselves on the brink of financial ruin.
Owning the Grand gave J.B. Barron not only the opportunity to return to being a theatre impresario — he brought pianist Artur Rubinstein to Calgary in 1942 and 1944 — but the Chicago Style Lougheed Building would serve as a model for his greatest project yet to come.
Located on the corner of 6th Avenue and 1st Street S.W., the 6-floor, mixed-use building contained the Sherman Grand Theatre, retail at street level, offices and a penthouse. When opened in 1912, it was Calgary’s most prestigious corporate address. (By the end of the 20th century the building was in severe decline and only thanks to a devastating fire in 2004 did it galvanize wide-spread civic support for its restoration.) J.B. Barron used this model to build his own mixed-use building with the Uptown Theatre, stores at street level, office space on the second to tenth floors and an eleventh floor containing office space for his business as well a penthouse for him, since he and Amelia were by then separated. The penthouse opened on to a rooftop garden for his dog, Butch.
Completed at a cost of $1.125 million, the Alberta Association of Architects (ASA) listed the Barron Building as Significant Alberta Architecture. The penthouse design was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright. The rooftop garden won the Vincent Massey Award for excellence in urban planning for a rooftop garden.
The building housed Sun Oil, Shell Oil, Socony Mobil Oil Company and others. New office towers sprung up around it, inspiring the expression, “the oil patch.” (Built so far west, it also inadvertently saved from demolition early 20th century buildings along the eastern section of 8th Avenue that today make up the Stephen Avenue National Historic District.) Calgary’s position as the oil capital of Canada was sealed.
J.B. Barron passed away in 1965. His sons took over the management of the building until 1981, when they sold it to a Swiss family for what is believed to be $6 million. The real estate market soon collapsed and the building was eventually foreclosed. It stood on the market through the mid 1980s until 1992 when Blake O’Brien, a young banker, placed a joke bid of $250,000 at an auction and found himself the accidental owner of the Barron Building and Uptown Theatre.
Under O’Brien, the Uptown Theatre flourished as if a scene out of Cinema Paradiso, while the rest of the building languished empty like a Sicilian village. For years, O’Brien lived with his own dog in the penthouse, filled with 1950s furniture.
In 2005, while attending a Calgary Centre Hadassah meeting, I met Linda Barron (née Rosenthal), a Winnipeg native. When asked if she had a connection to the Barron Building, she explained that it had been built by the grandfather of her husband, John Barron. My relationship with the Barron family grew, along with my research about their extraordinary grandfather and his building.
In 2009, the building was bought by Strategic Group and its future came into question when the company discarded the contents of the penthouse, removed the theatre marquée ,and ripped out the Uptown Theatre.
Between 2007 and 2013, I advocated for the restoration of the Barron Building and Uptown Theatre by writing articles, giving public talks and, in 2012, witing a submission that included placing the building on that year’s National Trust of Canada Top Most Endangered Places List. This advocacy helped raise awareness of the significance of the building. Representatives of Strategic Group attended my talk for Historic Calgary Week in the summer of 2012 and, in the fall of that year, I was invited to meet with Riaz Mamdani, CEO of Strategic Group, who showed me his plans for the building. I asked Mamdani to restore the Barron Building to the highest heritage standards and make it the jewel in his Strategic crown. I left the meeting uncertain that things would end well. Later, a number of groups wrote to provincial and municipal governments and, in 2014, the Government of Alberta ordered a Historic Resources Impact Assessment.
After years of work, on March 15, Strategic Group announced they will be investing $100 million into the restoration and residential conversion of the Barron Building for which they will receive an $8.5 million incentive from the City of Calgary.
Strategic Group’s investment is likely the largest heritage restoration project in Calgary’s recent history and needs to be recognized and celebrated. The Barron Building’s continued life will serve to tell a wild story of fortunes lost and made across space and time.
With files from Daniel Barron and Donald B. Smith.
Irena Karshenbaum is a writer, historian and heritage advocate living in Calgary. www.irenakarshenbaum.com
Features
WINNIPEG EMPLOYERS SHOULD USE AI TO TRAIN, NOT JUST TRIM
By Dr. GLEB TSIPURSKY Generative AI has already entered everyday Canadian work. Statistics Canada reported that 35.9% of workers used generative AI in the previous 12 months. For Winnipeg employers, the important question is no longer whether staff will use these tools. The more consequential question is what kind of workforce employers will build while they use them.
An updated Stanford University analysis found employment among workers ages 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with less-exposed peers, with the gap widening over time. That trend should concern Winnipeg employers because the work most exposed to automation often overlaps with the work through which beginners develop professional judgment.
Entry-level employees do more than produce first drafts, conduct basic research, summarize information, prepare routine analyses, or handle standard customer questions. Those tasks are also training. Repetition teaches people what good work looks like, where common mistakes appear, when a situation is routine, and when something unusual requires escalation.
If employers simply remove that work, they may save time today while weakening the pipeline of people capable of handling harder work tomorrow. A firm can automate a junior task quickly. Rebuilding several years of missing experience later is much harder.
The better approach is to redesign entry-level work around AI-assisted apprenticeship. New employees can use AI to produce a first draft, but they should also verify the output against reliable sources. They can use AI to summarize a customer issue, but they should explain which facts matter and what remains uncertain. They can use AI to analyze routine information, but they should flag exceptions and bring consequential decisions to experienced colleagues.
That changes the role of junior employees without eliminating the learning built into the role. Instead of rewarding people for producing routine work manually, employers can reward them for checking AI output, spotting edge cases, asking better questions, and knowing when human judgment is required.
Managers also need to change how they supervise. If a junior employee submits an AI-assisted answer, the manager should ask how the employee verified it, what assumptions the system made, what could go wrong, and what would cause the employee to escalate the issue. Those questions turn AI use into a training process rather than a shortcut around learning.
Winnipeg’s small and mid-sized employers may be especially well positioned to take this approach. They often cannot afford to separate technology adoption, training, and talent development into different departments. The same manager who wants more productivity today also needs capable employees next year. That makes it practical to connect AI use directly to coaching and skill development.
Employers should also resist measuring AI adoption only by time saved or tasks completed. Those metrics matter, but they can hide whether the organization is developing stronger judgment. A more useful set of questions is whether employees are catching more errors, escalating the right exceptions, becoming more independent over time, and learning which decisions should remain human-led.
None of this requires employers to preserve every old task exactly as it was. Some routine work should disappear. The goal should be to preserve the learning function, not the old workflow. If AI removes one form of repetition, employers should deliberately replace it with another way for junior staff to practice, receive feedback, and encounter progressively harder decisions.
Winnipeg businesses can gain real productivity from AI without turning entry-level work into a dead end. The strongest employers will use AI to accelerate the development of beginners rather than treating beginners as the easiest cost to remove. That approach can improve productivity now while still producing the experienced professionals Winnipeg will need in the years ahead.
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Adapted from: The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press, 2026). https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/aibook
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, a behavioral scientist called the “Office Whisperer” by The New York Times, helps tech-forward leaders stop overpaying for AI while boosting engagement and innovation. He serves as the CEO of the AI consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, and wrote eight books, including The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press, 2026).
Features
IPL 2026/27 Preview: Beer Sheva Defends Its Crown
Israeli football enters the 2026/27 season with a genuinely open title race for the first time in years. Hapoel Beer Sheva claimed a dramatic sixth championship last May, edging Beitar Jerusalem by just three points after a campaign interrupted by regional conflict and settled almost entirely on head-to-head form. That kind of finish leaves scores unsettled, and every major club has spent the summer either reinforcing a title push or plotting revenge. With four Israeli sides now competing in European qualifiers simultaneously, the new Ligat ha’Al campaign carries more weight than it has in years.
How Beer Sheva Won It
Ran Kozuk’s side did not simply outscore the league last season; they won the moments that mattered against the team chasing them hardest. Beitar Jerusalem lost twice to Beersheba across the regular campaign and could only draw both playoff meetings, a pattern one report summed up bluntly: if you want to be champions, you have to beat the champions, and Beitar never managed it. Kings Kangwa was named the league’s most valuable player, while captain Miguel Vitor and goalkeeper Ofir Marciano anchored a squad that closed out the title with a 4-2 win over Maccabi Tel Aviv. Owner Alona Barkat has kept that core together, giving Beersheba a real shot at back-to-back titles, assuming Champions League fixtures don’t wear the squad down.
Beitar’s Response and the Chase Pack
Losing a title race by three points after leading for large stretches tends to force change, and Beitar Jerusalem has responded accordingly. Almog Cohen, previously the club’s sporting director, has stepped into the head coach role, replacing Barak Itzhaki after the campaign ended in disappointment. Captain Yarden Shua, veteran forward Omer Atzili and Dor Hugi remain the attacking core, though the club opens the season without injured midfielder Adi Yona, a blow given how much Beitar leaned on midfield control last year. Maccabi Tel Aviv arrives with a different kind of statement: despite finishing outside the top two domestically, they won the Israel State Cup in a chaotic 2-1 final against Beersheba that produced six red cards, suggesting the squad has quality to challenge again even if consistency remains the question mark.
The Return of European Football on a Bigger Scale
What separates this season from recent ones is the sheer number of Israeli clubs competing for continental places at once. Beersheba enters Champions League qualifying as domestic champions, though for security reasons their ties have been relocated to Szombathely, Hungary rather than played at home. Maccabi Tel Aviv, seeded thanks to a healthy UEFA coefficient, goes into Europa League qualifying against the winner of Sheriff Tiraspol and Aluminij. Beitar Jerusalem and Hapoel Tel Aviv both enter Conference League qualifying, the latter having secured their spot via a fourth-place playoff finish. Playing qualifiers on neutral ground has become routine for Israeli clubs, and it hasn’t stopped them from competing credibly.
Mid-Table Ambition and the Promotion Effect
Beyond the four clubs chasing European nights, the middle of the table looks unusually competitive heading into August. Hapoel Petah Tikva and Hapoel Tel Aviv both returned to the top flight after a season away, and Hapoel Tel Aviv’s playoff run last term shows promoted clubs can climb quickly rather than simply survive. Maccabi Haifa and Ironi Kiryat Shmona, both capable of springing results against the traditional big three, will look to use a full pre-season to close the gap. That added depth tends to produce the unpredictable midweek results that make a 14-team division worth following from the opening whistle.
What to Watch as the Season Kicks Off
Beersheba’s fixture list is the one to track first, since balancing Champions League qualifying with league form in August and September will say a great deal about whether this squad has the depth to go back-to-back. Beitar’s response under a rookie head coach is the second storyline, particularly whether Cohen can get more out of a group that dominated possession last season but couldn’t finish off the champions when it counted. For fans following these storylines match by match, tracking how the market prices each side into the opening rounds is a useful gauge of who bookmakers actually rate, and anyone comparing options for the season ahead can check out the best betting sites in Canada for a sense of how odds and coverage are shaping up before a ball is kicked.
Between a defending champion carrying continental fixture congestion, a rival reshaping its coaching staff, and a deepening mid-table, Ligat ha’Al enters the new season with more storylines running in parallel than it has had in years. Whether Beer Sheva backs up their sixth title or Beitar finally converts near misses into silverware, the opening weeks should offer the first real clues.
Features
Musings from Dizengoff Street – by Bruce Brown (updated August 14)
(Posted August 18, 2026) And the beat goes on in the strait. A bit quieter lately although may be heating up again with the 60day ‘ceasefire’ officially expired. And while Iran occasionally lashed out over the last two months, they did not attack Israel. How do you spell deterrence. According to my Yiddisha mama, its spelled ‘Pftt. Pftt. Pftt‘.
(August 14, 2026) Despite three years of varying degrees of warfare. Moody’s biannual report of the Israeli economy was quite positive. Basically, the report saw no pressures on Israel’s credit rating. While the macro data remains strong, Israel still faces a complex geopolitical situation further complicated by upcoming elections (we pondered about how crazy that is in an earlier muse). And Israeli’s inflation rate for the first half of 2026 fell to a historic five year low of 1.2% (vs Canada’s 2.6%). As for my own pocketbook. Haven’t had an infamous Israeli bank overdraft in years. So all is fine.
If that’s not enough economic voodoo talk for one musing. According to one famous barometer. Israel moved to second place in the Economist’s Big Mac Index. Introduced in 1986, this tasty indicator compares the purchasing power parity across countries by measuring the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac -which most can relate to- against the benchmark U.S. burger. So while a Big Mac in the U.S. costs $6.22. In Israel it costs $7.67, the second most expensive place to buy the hamburger in the world, Switzerland being the most pricey at a whopping (no reference to Wendy’s) $9.04. While the cheapest Big Mac can be enjoyed in Indonesia at only $2.38. Canada ranked 22nd of the fifty-four countries considered, at $5.85. Parity. Smarity. I’m going for my Big Mac fix. Just after I finish writing this muse….
(August 11, 2026) Bravo Boy George. We certainly will dance again! And what better way than with his new reggae tune. Now Boy George is dealing with a hostile backlash against his just stand for Israel. Having to withdraw from London’s East End production of Jesus Christ Superstar where he was going to play – guess it. King Herod. Never a big Culture Club fan, but I am anyway -as a sign of support- going to download his greatest hits to my Spotify library. And hoping to have a chance to buy a concert ticket should Boy George perform in Israel. Kind of reminds me of Bob Dylan’s 1983 song Neighborhood Bully. Also in defense of Israel. I’m going to download that song as well. Although don’t think he was hounded the way Boy George is now. Sign of the times I guess.
+++++
Coming clean. I sometimes find myself chanting, to no one in particular, that snappy little ditty ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ Now why can’t we come up with something as catchy. With such an impressive gene pool of great Jewish songwriters. George Gershwin. Irving Berlin. Burt Bacharach. Carole King. Neil Diamond. Leanard Choen. Paul Simon. Gene Simmons, Amy Winehouse. Bob Dylan. And yes, even the Buddhist Boy George. And still… gurnish! No wonder we’re losing the global PR battle
(August 8, 2026) Outside Basimta Café in Central Jerusalem. Love the red shirt against a tiny sea of black. Not sure I am shrugging because of the ultra-orthodox uproar over a Jerusalem café operating on Shabbat or the lack of an ultra-orthodox uproar over a Jerusalem café operating on Shabbat. For the last six weeks Israeli headlines shouted about the cafe chaos. With the ultra-religious blocking entrances and storming the café. While shouting ‘Shabbos! Shabbos!’ Upsetting the secular amongst us just wanting to enjoy our Saturday iced matchas. So the wife and I thought we would check it out. And. Yes. Buy something to support the business. Uproar. Not. Blocked entrances. Not. Storming the café. Not. Albeit there were police barriers separating the devout protesters from the coffee drinkers. The protesters being just a few dozen black clad, pious Jews. Mostly teenagers. And yes. Shouting ‘Shabbos! Shabbos!’ Certainly underwhelming in its reported mayhem. Reminds me of the famous saying misattributed to Mark Twain – “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.” But I did enjoy my iced matcha.
(August 6, 2026) Here we go again. Another round of forever negotiations. As someone who negotiates for a living. The way things are going in the straits. If I had to recommend a book on the subject to a new hire. Between The Art of the Deal, A Presidential Edition by Donald J. Trump or The Real Art of the Deal by the Mullahs of Iran with a special forward by the IRGC. Well. I would choose the latter.
(August 3) Bravo Yoav Segalovitz, Liberal Yesh Atid MK and Monsour Abbas, United Arab Ra’am MK and party head. For breaking a glass ceiling where a Jewish lawmaker joins an Arab political party. No less a political earthquake in my little shtetl. Which can significantly impact coalition block arithmetic and posturing and strategy in the upcoming elections. Now Ra’am can be considered a legitimate ‘Zionist’ partner when forming coalition blocks and potentially pushing the ‘center left/right’ party over the 60 seat majority threshold. In our crazy parliamentary democracy defined by a multi-party (about fourteen!!), proportional representation system. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Israel’s proportional representation model of governance is the best parliamentary democracy system except for all other forms of working democracies. Stay tuned for more amateurish political musings as we move towards Israel’s 26th national election – five of them held since 2019.
(August 1) Although both sides say they are open to diplomacy. Neither really trusts the other. And American military action, or its threat, continues. I read headlines in the middle of the night -it’s a nervous habit lately– that the Dynamic Duo of Trump and Netanyahu may again strike in unison. Possibly this weekend. Yikes! Prompting me, at 2:30 AM, to dash around the house stocking my safe room. Bottled water. Canned food. Medicines. Documents. The beat goes on….
If it’s crazy here. It’s insane in Italy. With a recent online ‘Jew Hunt’ in the Milan area. Before being removed, the digital forms urged reportings of Israelis and Italian Jews staying in local hotels. The infamous Global Sumud Movement -yes, the one coordinating ‘peace and humanitarian’ flotillas to Gaza- was somehow connected. Although they deny involvement?! This deranged decree was looking to identify Zionist tourism and Zionist neo-colonization in Italy. I’ll stick with stocking the saferoom.
Then there’s New York Mayor Mamdani, a Global Sumud Movement supporter, threatening to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu if he comes to New York. But since discovered he has no legal right for such a grandstanding, antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-Western, anti-democratic antic. Maybe Mandami should be arrested! Or at least impeached. For being a grandstanding, antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-Western, anti-democratic mayor.
Here’s a post Bruce sent us Friday, July 31:
WARTIME MUSINGS
Should credible threats against FLOTUS and ‘FSOTUS’ (first son..) not be justification to attack first.
As for yesterday’s summit. Netanyahu really can’t win. Explainer. If Trump now attacks without victory its ’cause of Netanyahu. If Trump now attacks with victory its ’cause of Trump. And, in Israel, if Trump doesn’t attack -victory or not- Netanyahu failed in his eighth meeting with Trump. And if Trump does attack -victory or not- half the country will vilify Bibi anyway. Missing a permutation?
Ya. I know. Kinda’ need a definition of victory for that musing to work.
And here in my little shtetle. We go to sleep unsure if there will be a code red in the middle of the night. And if not. We wake up thinking it will be tonight. How do you define stress?
Seemed like an appropriate way to end this musing.
Bruce Brown is a former Winnipegger who made aliyah to Israel over 35 years ago. Bruce first began writing for us – in his own inimitable style, in 2012, during what was known as “Operation Pillar of Defense.” His occasional musings on aspects of life in Israel that were far from what you’d typically read in other reports from Israel were hugely popular – both in the print Jewish Post & News and on this website.
We’re now glad to report that Bruce is back writing for us – this time on a regular basis. We will post Bruce’s reports as they arrive – with the date of each post at the beginning of that post.
Here’s some information about Bruce – and awards he’s received for his writing:
Bruce Brown. Canadian born. Now living in Israel (for a long time). Bruce works in Israel’s hi-tech sector by day and, in spurts, is a somewhat inspired writer by night. He received the Americal Jewish Press Association’s award for writing excellence in 2019 and 2015. And wrote the1998 satire, “An Israeli is….”. Bruce’s visuals are AI-assisted and created with ChatGPT under his inimitable visual concept and creative direction. Bruce’s musings are political, social, economic and personal. With lots of biting, contrarian, sardonic, irreverent and mischievous insights.
