Thanks for the Business: K.C. Irving, Arthur Irving, and the Story of Irving Oil, 2020

As Canadian historians well know, New Brunswick’s Irving family and its inextricable empire cast a long shadow over the region’s business, economic, and political history. Their multigenerational saga has created its own interdisciplinary Irving scholarly subfield, from books to articles to court cases to royal commissions; when it comes to Canadian and Maritime business history, however, the family holds a special place. With Kenneth Colin, KC, one of Canada’s most successful businessmen of the 20th Century, and his three sons leading the family firm(s) to ever greater wealth across the 21st , how could they not? Given their immense influence, over the decades— depending on when, and who was doing the writing –some of this Irving scholarship has been laudatory, some of it very critical.

Thanks for the Business is Donald Savoie’s particular, somewhat unconventional contribution to the Irvings’ historiographical record, one that probably reveals more than he intended. As one of Canada’s leading scholars of public policy, public administration, and economic development, and a longtime Canada Research Chair at the Acadian Université de Moncton, Savoie is himself something of a legend in academic and governmental circles in New Brunswick, Ottawa, and beyond. If there is anyone who knows New Brunswick’s history and its development, and who could write a penetrating analysis of the political economy of the Irvings, Savoie would be it.

But, while Savoie is a first rate scholar, this is not really an academic book, though at times it reads like one: it contains long, academic-y passages on a host of economic and political subjects; it includes notes and citations; methodologically, like many policy analyses (and biographies, to be sure), the literature has been consulted and dozens of interviews conducted. Savoie cites his own work in places and, as might be expected given his expansive scholarly record, does not shy away from taking sharp positions on pertinent economic and political issues.

At the same time, Thanks for the Business is also very unscholarly in its tone and approach. Being from New Brunswick, Savoie has s(kin) in this story, and there is clearly a significant personal element to the book. As a proud Acadian from Bouctouche, the same hometown as the Irvings, Savoie states his motivation and positionality upfront, and throughout the book mixes and connects his and his province’s story to the Irvings. Savoie’s unabashed home-province boosterism unrepentantly shapes his views of the family, their history, and the Irving Oil firm’s development over the last few decades, which he sees as overwhelmingly positive.

The book’s unusually personalized approach also stems from the fact that Savoie is a friend of Arthur Leigh Irving (b. 1930), the biographical subject and central focus of this contribution to the Irving canon. Now, to be fair, many business biographies are not scholarly, nor should they necessarily be; often, they are aimed at different audiences and, often, can have a different utility than a scholarly treatment. Even then, Thanks for the Business is something different yet again, since biographical authors usually keep some personal distance between themselves and their subjects (by necessity, or choice), and don’t usually include themselves in the book.

As a personalized biographical treatment, the book contains many passages explaining Donald and Arthur’s fifteen-year long friendship. It includes stories of Arthur and Donald, travelling together, hunting together, and there are photos of them and their wives enjoying a Boston Red Sox game together. Though Savoie makes clear that Thanks for the Business is a labour of love, and that he took no payment to write it (nor did he for an earlier volume on another favourite New Brunswick son, Harrison McCain), there’s little doubt that the two men have enjoyed a relationship that is unlike the usual (less subjective) biographical subject-author pairings. What results is a friendly view of the Irvings and their history, Arthur and his life, and the Irving Oil firm and its development, written in an uneven, mostly-but-often-non-scholarly tone.

The first half of Thanks for the Business covers—necessarily –the rise of the Irving family going back three generations before Arthur. There is a gauzy overview of the Irvings’ arrival in the New World and good coverage of the family’s early history. The focus is on the pioneering efforts of Herbert (b. 1821, “The First Irving Entrepreneur”), JD (James Dagavel, b. 1860) and, of course, imperious KC (b. 1882), Arthur’s father. It is a quintessential rags-to-riches tale of hard work and hustling entrepreneurship which, even by the time KC was a young man, had made the family wealthy and powerful in New Brunswick.

This part of the book utilizes much of the previous Irving literature (both positive and critical) to examine the 19th and early 20th Century development of the Irving enterprise, especially KC’s accelerated success starting in the 1920s. Savoie quickly dispenses with some of the criticisms the family has faced across its reign in New Brunswick, emphasizing that unlike so many other famous expatriated New Brunswick business (and political) legends (Bonar Law, Beaverbrook, Dunn, Killam), KC kept his business in New Brunswick. There is a hometown pride at work here.

Arthur’s part in the story picks up in the second half of the book, as the middle-child of KC’s three sons, groomed to take on the most lucrative side of the empire, the Irving Oil businesses. In 1952, aged twenty-two, Arthur joined the firm, learning on the job, and becoming CEO in 1972. Though he slowly relinquished day-to-day management of Irving Oil starting in 2000, Arthur controls the firm through the Arthur Irving Family Trust (which may go to daughter Sarah).

This part of the book, which focuses on Arthur’s career, results, in part, from conversations that the two men had had over the years; Savoie just started taking notes at some point. Framed within his context of Maritime boosterism and personal assessment, Savoie provides considerable detail on Arthurs’s career, and thus the history of Irving Oil: learning the ropes from his father; his work to expand Irving Oil significantly in Eastern North America and Europe; his getting full control of the refinery from Chevron, a turning point in the firm’s development; his oversight of the refinery’s many upgrades and expansions; the decision to keep and build a new head office in Saint John; developing the Irving “Big Stop” stores and stations, heralded as a service innovation. Savoie also discusses Arthur’s push for the Energy East pipeline, which did not succeed, but the issue does allow him to tell of KC’s own push for the unbuilt Chignecto Canal project. He sees the two stillborn projects as evidence of the region’s (and the Irvings’) poor treatment at the hands of the federal government.

Savoie also evaluates Arthur’s record as a businessman, which he finds impressive. There is much attention paid to the “Irving School of Business”, whose curriculum is made up mostly of lessons in good service and determination, leaned from KC. In terms of Arthur’s accomplishments, while there are many statistics cited of jobs and investments, especially in the refinery, there is little discussion of the specifics of Arthur’s vast wealth (according to Forbes, at $5.7 billion he’s the 8th richest person in Canada and 445th in the world— brother James is a slot below). But there are quite a few stories of his unquestionable energy, his relentless work ethic, his personal approach to his employees, and his considerable, significant philanthropy, including truly game-changing donations to universities (Acadia, Toronto, Dartmouth, and others), communities (in New Brunswick, and beyond), and institutions (Massachusetts Geneal Hospital) across the globe. In this regard, it is an impressive record.

To his credit, Savoie does directly engage with many of the controversies that have shaped the Irving narrative, both in the past and as part of Arthur’s/Irving Oil’s particular story. He addresses the family’s powerful influence upon New Brunswick politics (including the English- language media monopoly they once had), their arrangements with other giant integrated fossil fuel multinationals, some of the beneficial tax deals that the companies have fought for or made (“To be sure, I do not have to knowledge to assess if Irving Oil is paying what it ought to pay in taxes,” 304), and KC’s decision to move to the Caribbean. Savoie also addresses the controversy sparked by the $80 million donation to Dartmouth to create the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy & Society.

Indeed, in discussing the latter, Savoie directly tackles the elephant in the room: climate change. And here, he provides a plaintive defense of the donation, and Arthur and Irving Oil’s position on human-made climate change:

Arthur Irving and Irving oil are well aware of the debate around fossil fuels and climate change. They are not by any means climate change deniers. They accept that climate change is one of the most important issues facing the world and that human activity is its main cause. They have never discredited climate science or they do they intend to. The decision to create the Dartmouth energy institute speaks to their willingness to be part of the solution (249-50).

The book includes a chapter, “New Challenges” which outlines the ways that Irving Oil “takes climate change seriously and doing something about it,” including lessening emissions from the refinery, putting Tesla charging stations in its gas stations, and shifting to jet fuel as a major product of the firms’ output, for example. But Savoie does admit that “the task remains a work in progress” and “there is much more work to be done” (269).

Overall, what do we get when we look past the idiosyncrasies of this particular biographical approach? There is a relatively quick and fair background of the Irving family history, some good insights into Arthur himself (though, pointedly, not his brothers), and a synopsis of the Irving Oil firm and its operations in the last few decades. But there are a few other lessons that Savoie has taught us here, even if they are more implicit than intended.

First, Thanks for the Business is very much a broader story of a how a nineteenth century local farming and forestry concern grew into a twentieth century conglomerated behemoth fueled by automobile industrial modernity, and especially its lifeblood, petroleum. As most know, Arthur and his family’s main economic might comes from (first in Bouctouche, then Saint John): Ford Model T auto dealerships; Imperial Oil gas stations; then their own Primrose, then Irving gas stations; then, the oil refinery (1960; the largest in Canada, and much of the source of Arthur’s fantastical wealth); more gas stations; then all kinds of other postwar growth and acquisitions fuelled by oil, until the Irvings, collectively, became the biggest private employer in the province. Arthur’s share of his father’s enterprising ways is an oil and gasoline empire, with Irving Oil competing against (though sometimes cooperating with) the biggest firms in the world, in a “David v. Goliath” dynamic, as Savoie often discusses.

Second, though entrepreneurialism is an important theme in Thanks for the Business , the story of Irving Oil is less a study of business innovation, and more a recognition of the managerial acumen required to maintain generational wealth, mostly in commodities, and adapt it to changing economic and political environments over time. Certainly, there is a fascinating tale of entrepreneurial spirit passed down across the generations (Sarah would be the fifth, depending on how you count) of a privately-held and family-owned resource and service company. It also provides a useful case study in how (and if) this embedded, multigenerational firm is managing the epic transition away from fossil fuels required by society and the planet.

A third lesson, and one that also places the Irvings within an international framework, is their formation over time of a kind of Canadian chaebol or keiretsu, wherein the Irving Group of Companies, even if they do not share ownership or direct corporate connection, are a New Brunswick symbiote. The brothers and their offspring may no longer see eye-to-eye on all matters, but they are still all Irvings in New Brunswick, which remains their extended family fiefdom. To continue the international comparisons, the Irvings are a long-time success story similar in profile to the privately-held Koch Industries, though somewhat less political, and with quite a few billion less in family assets.

Finally, Savoie’s book reveals— or rather, reminds readers –that the Irvings are yet another example in the longstanding Canadian story of multigenerational family fortunes (Thomsons, Rogers’s, Westons, etc., etc.), and their ubiquitous influence upon ordinary Canadians’ everyday lives. But Arthur and Irving Oil’s story is also a tale of the continued and pervasive power of global, integrated fossil fuel multinationals (in this case, semi-integrated and with a somewhat smaller reach), and of inherited, unequal wealth, and many of the complications of that reality upon New Brunswick’s, Canada’s, North America’s, and the world’s political economy.

Perhaps, unintentionally, Savoie’s unusual biography of Arthur Irving has more utility than meets the eye.