New Brunswick businessman James Kenneth Irving dies at 96

James Kenneth (J.K.) Irving, who was the last living son of New Brunswick industrialist K.C. Irving, has died at 96.

Chairman of J.D. Irving Limited, a family-owned, Saint John-based company that spanned the forestry, pulp and paper, tissue, lumber, building supplies, frozen food, transportation, shipping and shipbuilding industries, Mr. Irving was a giant even among the biggest names in Canadian business.

“It is with great sadness that the family of James K. Irving mark the peaceful passing of our father, age 96, today in Saint John, New Brunswick,” the Irving family said in a statement released by the company on Friday.

Mr. Irving was someone who could get private audiences with premiers and federal cabinet ministers or command attention in any boardroom. But those who knew him say he was most at home when tromping through the backwoods of New Brunswick. The gentlemanly billionaire was always happiest outside with his boots on, they say.

Mr. Irving was the eldest son of industrialist K.C. Irving, whose Bouctouche, N.B., sawmill grew into an international conglomerate that today employs more than 17,000 people. His brother, Arthur Irving, who was responsible for Irving Oil, died in May. His younger brother, Jack Irving, who oversaw construction, engineering, and steel fabrication companies as well as commercial properties and broadcasting, died in 2010.

His father, a well-known taskmaster, taught J.K. Irving the importance of being hands-on in all aspects of that business – a lesson he carried late into his senior years, often checking the logging roads of his company’s woodlots, inspecting the streams and measuring the distance between the timber tops.

“That was his absolute favourite thing in the world,” said Frank McKenna, a former Canadian ambassador to the United States who, as a premier of New Brunswick, came to know the Irvings well.

“He loved being in the forest, or on the rivers.”

Mr. Irving had an unpretentious, hardy woodsman-like personality, ingrained at an early age from his time in company paper mills and logging camps. Like his father, he was a private person who preferred old Ford vehicles and a Presbyterian work ethic over drinking, golfing or any kind of flashes of wealth.

“Sometimes he would go visit his sawmills at 11, 12, 1 or 2 in the morning,” Mr. McKenna said. “The Irvings are not remote managers, and I think that’s one of the reasons he was so deeply rooted in New Brunswick. He knew all the workers, he knew their names, he knew all the numbers even with hundreds of companies they had.”

His first business was selling eggs as a young boy with his brothers around Bouctouche. He told people how his father came home late one night and found two cartons on the counter – and woke J.K. up to deliver them immediately. The lesson: Work came first, no matter what.

Trees were certainly a big part of Mr. Irving’s business – his timber and forestry operation have planted more than a billion of them since 1957. Irving Woodlands, a division of J.D. Irving, is the sixth-largest landowner in the United States. His company grew into one of the most sophisticated forestry enterprises in the world, funding seed research that cut in half the time it takes a spruce tree to reach harvesting age.

He was equally hands-on in matters of international politics that affected his business. During a particularly tense phase in the Canada-U.S. softwood lumber dispute, Mr. Irving frequently jetted between Ottawa and Washington, meeting with politicians and showing a level of knowledge on the issue that surpassed anyone else.

“I had cabinet ministers tell me he knew more about that file than anybody on the planet. If they needed advice, that’s where they’d go,” Mr. McKenna said.

Mr. Irving also understood how political power worked. He often played host to influential American and Canadian politicians at his family’s lodges in New Brunswick, taking them salmon fishing on the Miramichi River or cooking lobster dinners in Bouctouche – driving to the wharf himself to negotiate a good price with the fishermen.

Once while playing host to former U.S. vice-president Hubert Humphrey at an Irving lumber camp in northern New Brunswick, he was embarrassed by the swarms of mosquitoes attacking his guests. So he ordered a company pilot to spray the area. The order was delayed until the pilot, who had been off-site drinking, finally woke up and buzzed the camp at around 5 a.m., alarming everyone inside.

“The Secret Service all came running out with their guns, and this spray plane dropped a whole load of mosquito repellent on all of them,” Mr. McKenna said.

His philanthropy work included efforts to protect the Atlantic salmon and establish nature parks around his home province. With his wife, Jean Irving, whom he called his “compass,” he established programs to help inner-city school kids and support pregnant teens, and funded public spaces, school playgrounds, chapels and gardens around New Brunswick.

Mr. McKenna said when he needed to put 5,000 people to work as part of an initiative to get people off social assistance, he simply had to call Mr. Irving, who would find a way to arrange it.

While his companies generated significant jobs for New Brunswick, he also attracted some controversy – whether it was for crushing union drives, threatening to move business out of the province or putting much of his wealth in offshore trust accounts in Bermuda.

“The sentimentality he had for the province has its limits. There’s also that toughness there,” said Jacques Poitras, a veteran CBC reporter and author of the book Irving vs. Irving. “He was the kind of person who could fire someone on the spot. But on the other hand, if you shook hands on a deal, that was it. That was his commitment.”

He took an old-fashioned, detail-oriented, no-nonsense approach to running his empire, Mr. Poitras said. Mr. Irving wanted to see his network of businesses in action, and was preoccupied with efficiency and productivity. When his own four children came of age, he put them through the same family business apprenticeship program that he went through.

Mr. Irving also played a significant role in New Brunswick’s media landscape. He owned all of the province’s daily newspapers and most of its weeklies, a near-monopoly that in 1971 brought charges against his father under the Combines Investigation Act.

While that media ownership sometimes invited criticism, there’s little question Mr. Irving often saw his business interests and those of New Brunswick as one and the same. It was his province, and he felt an obligation to look after it.

“I think he saw himself as a steward of this vast machine that was really embedded in the New Brunswick economy, and embedded in those communities,” Mr. Poitras said. “I think J.K. felt a responsibility to keep the thing running, to always make it bigger and better, and I think he succeeded in that.”

Mr. Irving leaves his four children, Jim, Robert, Mary-Jean and Judith; 14 grandchildren; 13 great-grandchildren; and extended family. His wife of nearly 70 years, Jean, died in 2019.