bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1992) — Summer 1992 // Été 1992, pp. 41–43
Citizens Irving — K.C. Irving and His
Legacy by John DeMont, Doubleday
Canada, 1991, 00 pp, $26.50.
John DeMont was raised in Saint John, New Brunswick, within the sight, sound and smell of the Irving pulp and paper mill. He rode on Irving buses fuelled with Irving gasoline refined in Irving’s Saint John refinery, Canada’s largest. Riding across town he would pass the Irving drydocks where Canada’s naval frigates are now being constructed. Nearby were the docked Irving ships carrying cargo to and from the ports of the world.
Leaving town, he could drive through miles of Irving timberlands, and a hundred miles eastward within the same province he could be where Irving tissues were being manufactured in Moncton. En route, his automobile would stop for gas at one of the hundreds of Irving gas stations and lunch in one of their good restaurants where the daily newspaper he read would be one of New Brunswick’s five all owned by the Irvings. The food he consumed at the restaurants might be vegetables prepared from Irving-owned Cavendish farms.
DeMont is the author of the first comprehensive study of the industrial titan, Kenneth Colin Irving, and his three sons who control the richest family empire in Canada. They, their wives, children and grandchildren are Canada’s wealthiest family…and they don’t just control. They own it all.
In a province where the Irvings employ one in twelve of the working population, the issue of whether this is good or bad, and who, in the end, runs the government, is rarely raised. Nor does this book debate it. Yet, in the 1960s when K.C. Irving was conducting decade-long warfare with the reformist government of the plucky young Premier Louis J. Robichaud, there were those who argued that outside investors would not come into the province because Irving was there, leaving no room for anyone else because of his iron control. In the end, “Little Louis” did manage to entice a few giants such as Noranda to develop mine, mill and smelter industries and they did bring major development, but K.C. Irving and his sons never ceased to battle them.
In the prologue to Citizens Irving, the author notes “there is nothing malevolent about K.C. and his family, who have always thought of themselves as ordinary, Christian folk doing their part to make New Brunswick a better place to live. “ To this he adds, “that the Irvings on balance have been good for the province is undeniable; if they had not existed, it is doubtful if another group of entrepreneurs would have emerged with the guts and drive to create jobs and enterprise in the barrens of New Brunswick.”
This excellent book is the best yet published on the incredible private, enigmatic family and its works, and the fact is that until Senator Robichaud’s private papers are published or a miracle of disclosure occurs within the Irving family, not a great deal more is likely to be published. The laws of libel and the difficulty of documenting what was apparent to some of us close to the Robichaud government make it nearly impossible to tell the whole story.
DeMont is cautious, perhaps conscious of libel chill, but withal has not spared the facts and aired the criticisms. He has done a splendid profile of the self-contained, autocratic yet personally unassuming and courteous nonagenarian whose hand is still close to the pulse of the empire he built in a long lifetime. As well, he does excellent profiles of the three sons who were so dominated by the patriarch’s example and direction they became almost his clones in respect of their business conduct. Courteous and unassuming, even dull in the public eye, they have the patriarch’s courtesy if not his courtliness. They do not have, however, his unrelentingly adversarial manner when closeted with those who opposed him. Indeed, his grandchildren now heading large elements of the empire are said to be almost benign mixers …except where business is involved.
Unlike writers in other media, John DeMont goes into the Buctouche, N.B. hometown background of the Irvings in valuable detail. There is nothing “rags-to-riches” about K.C. whose Scots forebears prospered in rural Acadian-French Kent County. His father was the big merchant of the port and district who gathered timber limits when K.C. was a boy at home and, as a youth, went working in the woods. This was a solidly middle-class entrepreneurial family, hard-working Presbyterians, raised among Catholic Acadians who were only then emerging from a century of isolation and deprivation. The Irvings always got on well with these neighbours.
Irving had once been a bagman for the Liberal Party, though later he said that “politics and business don’t mix.” However, as his career advanced, he took a most determined interest in provincial premiers and his support was impartial in that respect. In a small province like New Brunswick, premiers run governments pretty well on their own strength, and if that strength did not suit, K.C. went looking for a new one. There were periods when the young and, at first, rather naive Premier Robichaud was almost distraught with the intensity and persistence of the pressure being put on him by Irving. Later, after years of battling and controversy over the installation of the most radical social, municipal, educational, judicial and tax reforms ever effected by a Canadian province, the premier was left in a distressing personal state, and his party would have been battered in its third election had not the Irving people fixed on a mountebank and once-disbarred lawyer as the leader of the opposition party.
Since this book was published, the Irving empire has come onto the international stage with a challenge by the state of Maine to the family’s massive incursion into the United States. DeMont is made to look prophetic by his detailed chapter on the American ventures which in fact had their origin nearly forty years ago. It is an ironic twist in the era of Canada-USA free trade that in February of this year the Maine state legislature introduced a bill to give its attorney-general more authority to police the oil industry. This was a direct move to halt the spread of Irving gas stations, imposing a moratorium on expansion until 1994. Irving Oil Corporation, the USA subsidiary, now owns some 130 stations in Maine and controls 25 percent of the state’s gasoline industry, 60 percent of the industrial fuel business, along with convenience stores and trucking operations. And of course their operations in the United States are not confined simply to Maine.
At the end of this very readable and useful book, the basic question remains undebated: are the Irvings or other such conglomerates good or bad for a small province and its governance? In New Brunswick, at least, the economic benefits seem real enough
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1992) — Summer 1992 // Été 1992, pp. 41–43. Read the rest of this issue →
