The family made their fortune in oil, and moved to timber, transport, building and retail. They control New Brunswick and are moving across the US Northeast.

Spelling it out: storage tanks at the Irving Oil Ltd refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick Aaron McKenzie Fraser · Bloomberg · Getty

A single family, the Irvings, with a fortune founded in oil, control the eastern Canadian province of New Brunswick. Over more than a century, they have established vertical and horizontal monopolies that allow them to do without suppliers and business partners. They are the opposite of a multinational, as they don’t extend their operations across the globe, but exploit everything in a limited area.

The Saint John oil refinery, Canada’s largest, supplies the family’s distribution network, which covers northeastern North America from Newfoundland to New England. It provides fuel for their huge fleet of lorries, which carry produce from their farms, newspapers from their printing works, and parcels handled by their delivery service; anything that doesn’t go by road travels on the Irvings’ rail network and fleet of ships.

The Irvings own vast tracts of forest, harvesting timber that is processed in their many sawmills and paper mills. Their construction company Kent Homes has easy access to building materials — wood, and steel and concrete, which the Irvings also produce. The list of group businesses seems endless: a naval dockyard, packaging factories, intercity buses, car dealerships, restaurants, an ice hockey team, DIY stores, pharmacies...

They also dominate the political scene. Their philanthropic pretensions fail to mask their interference in public affairs, both at federal level and in New Brunswick and the other Atlantic provinces, where they act like a second government. Few sports complexes, museums or university research centres (energy, forestry, sustainable development) are not Irving-sponsored.

Conflicts of interest

The family control all English-language newspapers in New Brunswick. Only the French-language daily L’Acadie Nouvelle is not a part of their empire, although they print it. They have acquired many local radio and television stations, and the University of New Brunswick presses. The conflicts of interest are grotesque: group-owned media reflect the positions of the Irving family in every area of social and industrial life. When it was reported in autumn 2018 that an explosion at the Saint John refinery had killed four people, a doctor doubted the accuracy of the company’s statement and the impartiality of the media coverage (1).

Dissent is rare. Teachers, civil servants and politicians fear reprisals; some have been intimidated. The 2015 dismissal of Eilish Cleary, New Brunswick’s chief medical officer of health, caused a sensation: she was investigating the use of glyphosate by Irving forestry companies. Rod Cumberland, a biologist formerly employed by New Brunswick’s natural resources department, and Tom Beckley, a professor of forestry at the University of New Brunswick, came under pressure when analysing the impact of this weedkiller on local fauna and the lack of transparency in the provincial government’s management of forests (2).

The Irving empire was founded more than 100 years ago. Kenneth Colin (KC) Irving, born in 1899, took advantage of a decline in traditional colonial businesses in Canada’s Eastern Provinces in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to move into oil, gaining control of its distribution like a smaller-scale John D Rockefeller. He then moved into timber, steel and mass-market retail, proving to be a merciless negotiator and skilful wielder of political influence. Today his three sons follow the same approach. As the biggest employer in the Eastern Provinces and the driving force behind industrial activity, the Irvings have made serfs of the local population. No antitrust legislation can contain their appetites. They are among the top five owners of property in North America. Canada’s National Observer (6 June 2016) calculates that the 200 or so enterprises they control have a combined capital of around C$10bn (US$7.5bn). None is listed on any stock exchange, so few details are available.

It might have been possible to win an election without Irving's approval, but it would have been difficult if he had opposed one directly Michel Cormier

The Irving group enjoys many tax exemptions in the name of job creation. It also receives subsidies, including (by a roundabout route) through the Large Industrial Renewable Energy Purchase Program, under which the provincial power company New Brunswick Power buys sawdust and wood shavings from industrial sawmills at high prices to be used in electricity generation.

New Brunswick has also entrusted the Irvings, directly or indirectly, with managing its huge public forests, while constantly downgrading its requirements. The latest ‘Forest Management Manual for New Brunswick Crown Lands’ reduces the size of buffer zones between forests and habitable areas, authorises more clear-cutting, increases scheduled production volume and cuts protected areas from 31% to 22% (3). (These areas include the Irvings’ private fishing camp.) The legislation has effectively created a free trade zone for the family: the natural resources department requirements cannot be modified without their agreement (4).

Maine the newest colony

The Irvings are able to exercise similar pressure in the neighbouring US state of Maine, where they also enjoy preferential treatment. With the support of the Canadian authorities, they have managed to overturn a referendum vote to ban clear-cutting, and defeated proposed legislation on the publication of accounts. The group now has its eye on the gold and copper deposits of Bald Mountain, in Aroostook county, and Maine looks set to become ‘Irving’s new colony’ (5). Ecologists are concerned that mining operations could contaminate the environment with sulphuric acid and arsenic. Jim Irving, one of KC’s sons, talks of ‘best practice’ and ‘high standards’ (6).

The Irving group avoids taxes: in the 1960s it was among the first to transfer the management of its assets to tax havens, by means of accounting procedures now widespread, which allow it to use intra-group invoicing, where, for example, a subsidiary registered in a tax haven buys crude oil and resells it at a high price to another in Canada, moving as much capital as possible into the tax haven. For nearly 60 years, Canadian legislators and courts have facilitated this, allowing the Irvings to avoid contributing to the federal budget (7). KC Irving liked tax havens so much that he became a Bermuda resident. As the sole shareholder in the conglomerate, he directed operations at a distance through his sons, who in Canada were officially just managers.

Don Bowser, an expert on political corruption, says there is less transparency and public consultation in New Brunswick than in Kurdistan, Guatemala or Sierra Leone, despite the volume of public money involved in the exploitation of natural resources: southern hemisphere activists are fighting to find out about money that extraction companies pay to their governments, but the citizens of a province in the Canadian federation cannot get information on the taxes and licence fees that the biggest enterprise in their province pays, or how much public aid it receives. In the 1970s KC Irving justified his lack of direct engagement in politics by saying that it didn’t mix well with business, and that New Brunswick was too small for politics (8).

Among the past premiers of New Brunswick, only Louis Robichaud (1960-70) expressed concern over the Irvings’ influence (although they helped to get him elected, like his predecessors and successors (9)). Robichaud’s biographer, Michel Cormier, wrote, ‘It might have been possible to win an election without Irving’s tacit approval, but it would have been difficult if he had decided to oppose one directly’ (10). KC Irving used to behave like a governor-general, terrorising the New Brunswick assembly by threatening to close down the provincial government.

New Brunswick’s current premier, Blaine Higgs, at the head of a minority government, is a former Irving group executive who worked in the oil sector for more than 30 years. Since taking office in 2010, he has campaigned openly for the integration of the timber and mineral markets of the Eastern Provinces and the US Northeast, and for the construction of a pipeline from the oil state of Alberta to the Irvings’ refinery. He illustrates a recurrent problem in Canada’s Maritime Provinces: politicians often behave like lobbyists, neglecting their role as representatives of the people.