The Company
Province

The Irving group is not one company. It is somewhere between 200 and 300 companies, and because they are all privately held, nobody outside the family knows the exact number.1

After a long and expensive restructuring completed around 2012, the empire built by K.C. Irving split among his three sons’ branches into three main pillars: J.D. Irving Ltd., which holds forestry, sawmills, pulp and paper, tissue, rail, trucking, food and building supplies; Irving Oil, which holds Canada’s largest refinery, roughly 900 service stations and the Canaport terminal; and Ocean Capital, which holds real estate and broadcasting.1

The weight of it is hard to overstate. The family’s companies produce roughly two-thirds of New Brunswick’s exports and have long been estimated to employ about one in twelve of the province’s workers.2 The defining feature is vertical integration: K.C. built a system where each company buys from another Irving company, so profit stays inside the chain from the tree or the barrel all the way to the retail shelf. It is genuinely impressive business engineering. It is also why so little of the money circulates out into the wider provincial economy.

And here is the backdrop that should stop everyone cold. Despite hosting one of the most concentrated private fortunes in the country, New Brunswick remains one of Canada’s poorest provinces. When investigative reporter Bruce Livesey compared the province’s social outcomes to the rest of the country for his award-winning House of Irving series, what he found was not prosperity in the shadow of all that wealth. It was the opposite: among the lowest median incomes, high out-migration, high poverty.3 The wealth is real. It has never translated into broad prosperity for the place that produced it.

The single most important fact about the Irving empire is not any one deal. It is that you cannot see most of the deals at all.

Every Irving company is privately held. They disclose nothing to shareholders because there are no outside shareholders. They disclose nothing to the public because the law does not require it. The result is a fortune that economists have pegged anywhere from a few billion to far higher, with the true figure blurred behind a network of numbered companies and international holdings.1

The offshore layer is documented. For decades much of the fortune was routed through trusts in Bermuda, which has no corporate income tax. K.C. set up two such trusts in 1976. When the family finally split the empire, the central challenge was unwinding those offshore trusts before a 2013 change to Canadian law would have taxed income from offshore trusts benefiting Canadian residents. As one U.K. lawyer for the family wrote in a Bermuda court filing, it was “the threat of a massive impending Canadian tax charge” that drove the family to carve up the fortune when it did.1

This is the part that sounds like a conspiracy theory until you read the receipts. New Brunswickers are not just enriching the Irvings by buying their gas and lumber. Through their governments, they are directly subsidizing the richest family in the province.

Rob Moir, an economist at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, put it about as plainly as it can be put: the question is why he is paying taxes at all when the money is being transferred from him to one of the richest corporations in Canada, in one of the poorest provinces.3 The exact total is, by design, unknowable. Because the companies are privately held, they never have to disclose how much they take in grants, subsidies, tax breaks or loan guarantees. The veil was pulled back only partly, and only by accident, when the U.S. Department of Commerce investigated Canadian paper producers and the filing exposed a list of provincial programs the conglomerate had drawn on.3

The power bill nobody voted for

The clearest single example is buried in NB Power’s rate filings. Since 2012 the province has required NB Power to buy electricity from six pulp and paper mills, three of them owned by J.D. Irving, at a high price, then sell it back to those same mills at a low price. Most of the time no electricity ever leaves the mill. The buy-high, sell-low transaction is a paper exercise whose only purpose is to lose NB Power money until the mills’ effective cost falls to a national average the province sets.4

It is not small, and it has not gone away. In 2025 the utility was forced to raise the discount 35 percent to a record $16.6 million in a single year, even as NB Power itself sinks deeper into debt. And every customer pays for it: about $20 a year on the average household bill.4

Here is the detail that should end the argument. At a rate hearing, NB Power confirmed it is not permitted to offer low-income households the kind of bill relief that utilities in other provinces provide, while it is simultaneously required by regulation to subsidize the mills.4

And the pattern compounds. In February 2025 Irving Paper laid off about 140 workers, roughly half its Saint John operation, blaming “uncompetitive” electricity rates. A year later the province awarded the same mill up to $45 million in tariff relief, an electricity subsidy among its terms, to protect the jobs that remained. The company’s own vice-president had written, months earlier, that it was “not looking for a subsidy.”5

If you want the single cleanest “they don’t pay, we do” story, it is the tax on the Canaport crude terminal, and it comes bundled with a perfect example of why the family owning the newspaper mattered.

In 1981, after the oil crisis, the province granted a property-tax exemption on the Canaport terminal. It was never removed, and has saved Irving an estimated $20 million or more in provincial property taxes.6

In 2005 a municipal concession cut Irving Oil’s Saint John property taxes from $8 million to a cap of $500,000 until 2030, negotiated one-on-one with the mayor of the day. It cost the city an estimated $75 million over ten years before council finally had it cancelled in 2016.6

And the kicker. In March 2023, Service New Brunswick accidentally reverted the exemption and charged Irving about $580,000 in Canaport property taxes, calling it an “inadvertent internal computer incident.” The charge was reversed and the exemption reinstated. The system briefly tried to tax them. A human undid it.6

Roughly half of New Brunswick is public Crown land, owned in theory by everyone. In practice its management is built around feeding the big mills, and J.D. Irving is by far the largest beneficiary, taking just under half of all the public wood that gets turned into lumber.7

The math has been bent in industry’s favour repeatedly. By 2022 and 2023 it turned absurd. After a royalty reset, the rate on softwood pulpwood was cut so low that, because the province pays forestry companies a management fee per cubic metre, the fee owed actually exceeded the royalty collected. Spruce, fir and jack pine pulpwood dropped from $7.59 to $3.40 per cubic metre, below the $3.90 per cubic metre the province hands back. The province became a net loser on softwood pulp taken from Crown land. The wood was effectively handed over for less than free.7

A 2014 provincial forestry strategy had already raised the Crown softwood cut by about 20 percent, in part by shrinking the share of land kept off limits from 30 percent down to 23 percent. A UNB forester called it an abject fail, and 184 academics signed a letter urging a halt.2

So when an ordinary New Brunswicker asks to lease a piece of public land to build something and make a life, and is told the province cannot just let anybody do it, hold that answer up against the reality. The province can, and routinely does, let a very large somebody cut public forests at rates so low it loses money on the deal. The gate is not closed. It is selective.

By its own account, J.D. Irving does not simply replant what it cuts. Since 1980 it has used selective breeding, the cloning of chosen “superior” spruce through a laboratory process called somatic embryogenesis, and a patented seedling treatment, to grow trees 15 to 25 percent faster.2

A forest bred for speed is a different thing from a forest. It grows faster, holds less, and carries the risk that comes with sameness. That is a defensible thing to say. “They genetically modify our trees” is not, and saying it would hand them the argument. So we say the true thing instead.

The plantation model depends on converting diverse natural forest into single-species softwood, kept clear of competing hardwoods with the herbicide glyphosate. About one-third of clearcut public land is sprayed.8

Over the same decades, New Brunswick’s white-tailed deer population collapsed, from roughly 286,000 in the 1980s to about 70,000 by 2014. The province’s chief deer biologist for 15 years, Rod Cumberland, connected the two: glyphosate kills the deciduous browse deer eat. Quebec banned forest herbicides in 2001, and its deer fared far better over a comparable period.8

What happened to Cumberland is the part worth sitting with. After he became a leading public voice against spraying, J.D. Irving publicly attacked his research as “irresponsible.” In 2019 he was fired from his teaching position at the Maritime College of Forest Technology, a college with industry and government representatives on its board. More than 34,000 people have signed petitions to stop the spraying. It continues.89

A monopoly is not just bigness. It is the active prevention of anyone else getting a foothold. The clearest record of this is in media, because that is the one industry where independent outsiders occasionally tried, and left a paper trail when they failed.

For decades the family owned every English-language daily newspaper in New Brunswick. By 1972 the federal government had won an antitrust case over that control; the Irvings got it overturned on appeal. When the 1981 Kent Commission recommended breaking up newspaper monopolies, Ottawa declined to act, and the Irvings simply shut their own competing papers on their own terms.10

Inside the newsrooms the family kept, the conditions were industrial. As documented in Jacques Poitras’s book Irving vs. Irving, reporters were required to file 1,500 words a day and were electronically monitored. When the largest industrial player in a province also owns the news, the people covering that player are treated like every other worker in the chain, and they are not going to break the story about their own boss.10

In 2006 a Senate committee studying media concentration called the New Brunswick situation something it could not find anywhere else in the developed world.11 In 2022 the family sold its newspapers to Postmedia. The ownership name changed. The thinness of independent local scrutiny did not improve much.10

One of the clearest examples of the make-it-look-like-they-don’t-own-it pattern is the railway. The freight line through southern New Brunswick is run by NB Southern Railway, owned by a holding company with the generic name “the New Brunswick Railway Company.” The plain name does the work of obscuring the owner.12

Irving has held the underlying rail land since 1941. It picked up the operating line in 1994, when Canadian Pacific abandoned its track east of Montreal and J.D. Irving incorporated NB Southern to buy roughly 132 miles of it. That line connects the Port of Saint John and the Irving Oil refinery to the continental rail network: real strategic control of the province’s main freight artery.12

And then there is Lac-Mégantic. The oil train that derailed and destroyed the centre of that Quebec town on July 6, 2013, killing 47 people, was carrying volatile crude bound for Irving Oil’s refinery in Saint John, and the final leg of that journey was contracted to Irving’s own NB Southern Railway. Irving Oil pleaded guilty to 34 counts under the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act for failing to properly classify the crude’s danger, was ordered to pay $4 million, and contributed $75 million to the compensation fund. NB Southern was charged with 24 counts of its own and pleaded not guilty.1314

The Saint John refinery is the largest in Canada, processing 320,000 barrels of crude a day, and it is New Brunswick’s single largest emitter of the greenhouse gases that warm the climate. It runs on imported crude, not Western Canadian.15

There was a real succession wobble. In June 2023 Irving Oil launched a strategic review, including a possible full or partial sale, raising the prospect of an out-of-province owner. Then, in January 2025, the company announced it is “strong and secure” and would remain a privately held company. So the accurate statement is the narrow one: they considered selling, and chose not to. Not “they’re selling.”15

The other exit is the dry dock you can still stand and look at. Saint John Shipbuilding was once Canada’s largest shipyard and built the navy’s Halifax-class frigates. In 2003 Irving Shipbuilding permanently closed it in exchange for $55 million in federal money conditioned on the closure being permanent; the site became a gypsum wallboard plant. Then, in 2011, Irving Shipbuilding won the federal government’s $35 billion National Shipbuilding contract, at its Halifax yard. The public helped pay to permanently shutter Canada’s largest shipyard in Saint John, and the enormous prize landed at the family’s other yard in another province.2

Beyond the big set pieces is the everyday experience: it is genuinely hard to spend a week in this region without buying from the chain. Roughly 900 service stations across Eastern Canada and New England. Kent Building Supplies as a dominant building-supply chain. Cavendish Farms in the freezer. Irving tissue on the shelf.2

Bruce Livesey’s argument ties the wealth to the poverty directly. A family that dominates the job market, he argued, can suppress wages because there is no competition bidding workers away. Low wages, plus offshore profits, plus public subsidy, is not a recipe for a prosperous province. It is a recipe for exactly the New Brunswick that exists.3

The structure is visibly built around flexibility for the employer. Mills open and close with wood supply. In February 2025, Irving Paper laid off 140 workers, roughly half its operation, and a year later collected up to $45 million in public money to keep the rest.5

There is an old joke in New Brunswick that every premier works for the Irvings. Blaine Higgs, premier from 2018 to 2024, actually did. He was hired by Irving Oil a week after graduating in 1977 and spent 33 years there, rising to senior executive before entering politics.16

The clearest documented instance of the imbalance becoming action came in 2021. Internal emails obtained by CBC News through a right-to-information request showed that a letter to the independent Energy and Utilities Board, urging it to fast-track an Irving Oil application to raise wholesale fuel margins, was drafted by civil servants, signed by a cabinet minister, but sent on the decision of the premier himself. The application could have added about $1 million a week to the cost of fuel for New Brunswick consumers. Irving Oil dropped it after the board found it had provided no evidence to justify the increase.1617