New Brunswick billionaire Arthur Irving drove Irving Oil to great heights

Joan Carlisle was just 19, a student at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., when she attended a family wedding in Nova Scotia. A brash young man, whom she had never met, approached her father to ask if he could take her to a postwedding party. Her father agreed and a puzzled Joan went off to the party that changed her life.

She quickly learned that her ardent pursuer was Arthur Irving, a smooth-talking oil-company salesman in his mid-20s, who was considered the most eligible bachelor in New Brunswick. He was one of three sons of K.C. Irving, the most powerful tycoon in the Maritime provinces.

Arthur Irving was persistent in his wooing. He showed up the morning after the party to drive Joan back to Sackville. Within two years, they would be married.

“Arthur was absolutely charming – no one was more charming than he was,” recalls Joan Carlisle-Irving, seven decades after their meeting and long divorced from Arthur. She remembers demanding that her future husband kneel before her to propose.

It would be one of the few times Arthur Irving easily surrendered to anyone, as he took command of his father’s oil company and its massive refinery in Saint John, the biggest in Canada. Through his ubiquitous service stations and tanker trucks, he entrenched and expanded “Irving” as a household name throughout Eastern Canada and the U.S. Northeast.

Arthur Irving always knew what he wanted and would go after it with a fierce determination – with occasional outbursts of volcanic temper that sent employees scrambling for cover. On Monday, he died of cancer at the age of 93 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where he supported cancer research. He was the wealthiest individual in Atlantic Canada – Forbes magazine estimates his net worth at US$6.3-billion – but he left behind a failed succession and an uncertain future for the company, which is the cornerstone of New Brunswick’s economy.

It is an ambiguous legacy for a man who exuded such irrepressible optimism. “He lit up the room” with the white heat of his personality, recalls Frank McKenna, the former New Brunswick premier who had to work with the massive Irving interests to run the province.

Many children of wealthy parents coast on their inheritances but Arthur drove Irving Oil to greater heights with a ruthless ambition that matched that of his father. The Saint John refinery, a model of efficiency, now commands half the province’s manufacturing exports and 5 per cent of the gross domestic product. He built a distribution network that extends down the Atlantic coast to Boston, and added a refinery in Ireland.

It is rare to find so much regional wealth concentrated in one person, or family, says University of New Brunswick economist Herb Emery. The only Canadian equivalent is B.C. billionaire Jimmy Pattison, with a fortune built on supermarkets, car dealerships, outdoor signs and forestry.

It all started in Bouctouche, an Acadian village on New Brunswick’s east shore, where Arthur’s grandfather James Dergavel Irving (J.D.) accumulated a sawmill and other properties. J.D.’s son Kenneth Colin, or K.C., took over the mill but set his horizons far beyond Bouctouche, building a sprawling empire of forestry, retail, media, shipbuilding, real estate and that massive oil refinery in Saint John. K.C. had three sons, James, Arthur and John, whom he would train in street-smart management and dragoon into his businesses.

Arthur was the middle son, born on July 14, 1930, in Saint John to Harriet and K.C. Irving. The Irvings were a strict household but young Arthur liked a good time. He went to Acadia University, but, like his brothers, left before graduation. He essentially majored in rugby. The Irvings appreciated book-learning – Arthur would later become Acadia’s chancellor and a huge benefactor – but more valuable learning was to be acquired in their father’s businesses.

Arthur got to know another young man, Wallace McCain, a potato grower’s son from the Saint John River valley, who was employed by the Irving companies, as was Wallace’s brother Harrison. Wallace and Harrison would later build McCain Foods into a frozen-food colossus.

Years later, Wallace McCain would say that “Art and I used to run around together a lot, visit the odd girl. We were both single and raised a little hell and we were at the Irving house a lot.” He remembered K.C. as “a nice man, very polite but tough and straight.”

As a close family friend, Arthur was invited to Wallace McCain’s wedding to Margaret Norrie, who came from a prominent Truro-area family. Margaret’s cousin Joan Carlisle attended, which is how the couple met. The McCain and Irving families would be forever linked, sometimes allies but also bitter rivals when they trespassed in each other’s business territories.

Arthur started selling oil contracts for Irving Oil in eastern Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador. He got to know every nook and cranny of Atlantic Canada. He rose on the oil side of his father’s enterprises, while brother James (J.K.) managed forestry, retail and shipbuilding assets and John (or Jack) looked after the business in construction, steel fabrication and real estate.

Arthur adored his father, but sometimes chafed under K.C.’s iron fist. Joan Carlisle-Irving (she altered her surname after the divorce) recalls throwing a surprise 40th birthday party for her husband but Arthur was visibly upset by the occasion. He had hoped to be running Irving Oil by the time he was 40, but K.C. was not surrendering the reins.

Even when the elder Irving died in December, 1992, he continued to control his companies from the grave, having set up elaborate trusts domiciled in Bermuda. The three “boys” now in their 60s would manage their respective businesses, but not own them.

It was a global conglomerate run like a small family business. Decisions were made collegially by the three brothers, often over coffee at one of Irving Oil’s Big Stop restaurants, where the food was filling and the washrooms were sparkling clean.

Arthur would personally make sure they were spick and span. Former Irving executive Blaine Higgs says his boss’s idea of a good time was hopping on his motorcycle and doing the rounds of service stations and other facilities, checking that they lived up to the immaculate Irving standards.

Mr. Higgs, now Premier of New Brunswick, spent 33 years at Irving Oil and from time to time he felt the blast of his boss’s ire. “It could be over the smallest things in dollars and cents,” Mr. Higgs recalls, such as a light left on in a maintenance shed. But it fostered a culture that abhorred waste and demanded accountability.

The Irvings were street fighters who often got their way, enduring a bitter oil-workers’ strike in the mid-1990s in which they won union concessions; a nasty tiff with the McCains over subsidies and French-fry plants in Prince Edward Island; and the passing parade of premiers with their own agendas. When Frank McKenna became premier in 1987, he had to work with the family. The three brothers as a team would troop into his office to make their views known. With Arthur, it was always straight talk, no beating around the bush, Mr. McKenna recalls.

When newcomers came to New Brunswick, they would hear talk about “Irving,” as if there were a single person. In fact, they were three personalities. Arthur and James were more in the mould of their father, but John was shy and low-key.

Arthur’s marriage to Joan Carlisle produced four children, Kenneth, Arthur Jr., Emily and Jennifer, but ended in a bitter and very public divorce in 1980. He married again, to Sandra Ring, and they had a daughter, Sarah.

As the next generation of Irvings came on board, fissures began to appear in the monolithic empire. The businesses were much bigger and too unwieldy for coffee-at-the-Big-Stop management. Disputes broke out between the cousins. The oil and forestry divisions owned separate, neighbouring buildings in downtown Saint John, but even the parking lot became a contested zone as family branches fought over available spaces.

Then came a wrenching decision to break up K.C. Irving’s offshore trusts. It was partly about tax and estate planning but also submission to the reality that the kids didn’t get along. Arthur finally got to own Irving Oil, as his brothers’ families also acquired the assets they were managing.

For Arthur Irving, life was good. He had the big family house on top of a high hill where he could survey Saint John, essentially an Irving company town, and his world-class refinery belching in the distance. He could indulge his interests in motorcycling, duck hunting and canoeing in northern Canada.

But there were setbacks, such as Ottawa’s rejection of the Energy East pipeline proposal that would have transported Alberta oil to his refinery. Brother John died in 2010, just as Arthur was mired in a succession crisis that still haunts the business.

His two sons, Arthur Jr. and Kenneth, worked in the company, but he settled on Kenneth as his successor – a smart, progressive manager who fostered a culture of learning. Kenneth modernized operations, often making his own decisions. Arthur found semi-retirement difficult and would show up at the office unexpectedly; employees could hear noisy arguments.

Kenneth later revealed that he had long suffered from depression, and the challenges only intensified. The company announced in 2010 that he was taking a break for personal reasons but he never returned. Now estranged from his father, Kenneth disputed Arthur’s own trust arrangements.

With Kenneth out of the picture, Arthur seemed to settle on his youngest child, Sarah, as his potential successor, elevating her in 2015 to a senior position. It did not pan out. A year ago, Irving Oil announced a strategic review that may result in the full or partial sale of the company.

The disclosure rattled New Brunswick, where jobs, supply contracts and head-office salaries depend heavily on local ownership. That unease only heightened a few months later when Arthur moved from his chairman’s role to an emeritus title and Sarah left the executive ranks. For the first time, Irving Oil did not have an Irving in a leadership role.

Arthur leaves his brother James, his wife, five children, eight grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. But he also leaves a province on edge about the fate of Irving Oil, its 4,000 employees and the megarefinery. “I worry a lot about it,” Mr. McKenna says, in the wake of the loss of a “very committed owner.” The last page of Arthur Irving’s legacy is yet to be written.

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