The Irvings, one of Canada's most storied, secretive and controversial clans, shook up the country's business community this week with news that the family may break up its massive business empire, which began 125 years ago when J.D. Irving bought a sawmill in Bouctouche, N.B. Today, Five Things takes a closer look at the Irving dynasty, whose business and political clout has had a profound influence on generations of New Brunswickers.
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1. NUMBER 129, BUT WHO'S COUNTING?
The Irving family - led by brothers James (J.K.), Arthur and Jack - boasts the third-biggest fortune in Canada at $5.8-billion, trailing only the Thomson and Weston families, according to Forbes magazine's annual list of the world's richest people. That's good enough for Number 129 in Forbes's worldwide rankings, and (perhaps even more significantly for the members of the clan), Number 1 in New Brunswick - dwarfing the puny $2.6-billion fortune of frozen-food magnate and heated rival Wallace McCain, who ranks 349th on the Forbes list.
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2. THE IRVING ECONOMY
The Irving's business empire so dominates New Brunswick's economic landscape that it evokes images of coal-mining lords from Zola novels. The family is believed to employ, directly or indirectly, about one in three workers in its home base of Saint John - the province's biggest city - and about one in 12 in the province as a whole. Name an industry, the Irvings probably have their fingers in it: energy, forestry, consumer products, food processing, real estate, construction, manufacturing, shipbuilding, transportation, retail, marketing, media.
Irving Oil Ltd.'s 300,000-barrels-a-day refinery in Saint John, the country's biggest oil refinery, accounted for more than half of New Brunswick's exports by value in 2006 - representing almost one-quarter of the province's total gross domestic product. The refinery also single-handedly accounts for 42 per cent of Canada's petroleum-product exports. Those numbers could become even more gaudy in the coming years: Irving Oil has proposed building a second refinery in Saint John of about the same size, at a projected cost of up to $7-billion, to add much-needed refining capacity to a North American market that hasn't seen a new refinery since 1984. (Not bad for a province that has a grand total of four producing oil wells.)
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3. ALL THE NEWS THAT IRVINGS PRINT
If you're consuming mainstream news in New Brunswick, chances are you're getting it from the Irvings. The family owns all three English-language daily newspapers in the province, as well as most of the weekly papers and a handful of radio stations. The family's media concentration has come under intense scrutiny from government regulators on several occasions - including anti-competition charges that the Irvings successfully defended all the way to the Supreme Court in 1974 (back when they also owned one of the province's two TV stations) - yet the family has managed to retain its stranglehold on New Brunswick's press. Fittingly, one of K.C. Irving's long-time associates was Lord Beaverbook - another New Brunswicker who made a name for himself as a newspaper baron.
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4. POTATO WARS WITH THE McCAIN BOYS
Before they became the Irving's fiercest rivals, Harrison and Wallace McCain - the brothers from Florenceville, N.B., who built the idea of frozen French fries into a global financial empire - had once been loyal Irving employees. In fact, both men cut their managerial teeth under the tutelage of none other than K.C. Irving, the family patriarch; Harrison oversaw Irving gas stations in Nova Scotia, while Wallace ran the Thorne's hardware store chain in Saint John.
But in the mid-1950s, the McCain brothers struck out on their own. By the late 1980s, the family companies had become embroiled in a series of escalating business feuds that culminated in a major struggle for control of Prince Edward Island's potato industry. The McCains twisted enough political arms to kill the Irving's plan for a heavily subsidized processing plant on the Island, where they instead built their own plant with the help of government money. But the Irvings got the last laugh: They instead built their plant in New Brunswick - just up the road from the McCain's flagship plant.
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5. POLITICAL WARS WITH PREMIER ROBICHAUD
At the height of his power, K.C. Irving was considered a kingmaker, making and breaking political careers in New Brunswick. One political foe who didn't bend to his will, though, was Louis Robichaud, the province's tiny but stubborn premier of the 1960s, whose clashes with Mr. Irving are the stuff of legend. After crossing swords over Mr. Robichaud's sweeping tax reforms and the development of the province's Brunswick mining project, Mr. Irving made a concerted effort, from behind the scenes, to oust Mr. Robichaud in the 1967 provincial election, according to John DeMont's book Citizens Irving: K.C. Irving and his Legacy. Robichaud's Liberals edged out the Irving-backed Tories by six seats in the election, but, worn down by the battles and increasingly worried about his family's safety, Mr. Robichaud was out of politics four years later, at the tender age of 45.
David Parkinson