K.C. Irving's Business Empire Explained

On a winter Sunday sometime in the 1960s, a man named Mulrooney called a stranger's house in Saint John, New Brunswick, to complain that his furnace had run dry and nobody at the oil company seemed to care (00:27). The man who answered the phone apologized, called the oil yard, and then called Mulrooney back twice: once to say a truck was coming, and again, half an hour later, to confirm the oil had actually arrived (01:24). Mulrooney had no idea he had reached the owner of roughly 300 companies, a man whose refinery today still supplies nearly a fifth of the gasoline America imports (02:12). That second phone call, the one nobody asked for, is the whole story of K.C. Irving in miniature. He did not simply want problems solved. He needed to know, personally, that they were.

Irving grew up in Buctouche, a lumber town on New Brunswick's tidal coast, where his father ran a sawmill and a general store that extended credit to farmers who could not pay in cash (03:07). By fourteen he was running a bottle-salvage operation with two older boys working under him. His cousin Lee Stevenson later put it simply: he got more than both of them combined, but nobody minded, because, as Stevenson explained,

He owned the pull cart, and he ran the show. [05:15] — Lee Stevenson, K.C. Irving's cousin

That sentence described his next nine decades. Irving sold cars to farmers who had never owned one, taking horses and cattle as payment when cash ran short (13:46). He built a gasoline tank behind his father's store without asking permission. And when Imperial Oil, then Canada's largest oil company, cut off his supply because rival merchants complained he was undercutting them, Irving did not fold (15:50). He found a supplier two thousand miles away in Tulsa, Oklahoma, blended his own cold-weather gasoline, and named it Primrose, a mash-up of two competitors' brands, Premier and White Rose (19:05). Asked decades later whether Imperial had effectively created Irving Oil by cutting him loose, he waved the idea away: it was, he said, just a matter of time before he went into business for himself.

Owning Every Link

The habit that defined Irving's career is called vertical integration: owning every stage of a business, from the raw material to the thing a customer finally buys, so that no outside supplier can set your price or your terms. For Irving, it began almost by accident and ended as doctrine. In 1932, the government-owned Canadian National Railway raised his shipping rates while leaving his rival, Imperial Oil, untouched. The reason, he was told, was that Imperial owned a refinery and he did not (32:21). Irving argued with the railway for two years, then bought a coastal tanker and built his own wharf a mile from its headquarters. The tanker's maiden voyage ran aground in the mud in front of a crowd he had invited to watch him win; he spent the night shoveling beside his crew until the tide freed the ship (34:54). It was not a stunt that worked on the first try. It worked because he refused to let it fail.

The same instinct carried him through the Depression, when he did the opposite of what every rational competitor was doing. While rivals cut back, Irving bought. "There was less competition," he said. "You had to use your head and your ingenuity. You couldn't sit around sucking your thumb" (28:27). Two years into the crash, he bought an eleven-thousand-dollar Cadillac, not for comfort but as a public bet on the future (29:34). His son Arthur later distilled the logic into a single rule.

Never be worried, but be concerned. If you're concerned, you can do something about it. [30:19] — Arthur Irving, K.C. Irving's son

Irving also kept timber crews cutting for six straight years during the Depression, selling the wood in only three of them, stockpiling the rest while a bank, pressured by competitors, called in a two-million-dollar loan and demanded it back immediately (39:34). He found another lender and kept cutting. When lumber prices finally recovered in 1939, he was sitting on six years of inventory bought at Depression prices, worth a fortune.

None of this scaled without money, and Irving had a firm view about what money required. "The minute you make money," he said, "people spend all their waking hours trying to get it out of you" (25:31). He sold shares once, early on, then bought them all back, and he never took his companies public again. Private ownership meant he never had to explain a decision to a board. "You can take a calculated risk," he said, "if you only have to account to yourself" (75:36).

What the Province Owed Him, and He Owed It

By the 1960s Irving's companies supplied much of the region's gasoline, cut enormous volumes of its timber, and employed something close to thirteen thousand people in a small, poor province (79:35). He also owned every English-language daily newspaper in New Brunswick by 1968 (95:44). That concentration eventually put him in direct conflict with Premier Louis Robichaud, a reform-minded leader who wanted to rebuild the province's tax system under a program he called Equal Opportunity. Buried in that legislation was a provision allowing the government to cancel old industrial agreements, the kind of tax and cost guarantees Irving had relied on to justify his investments, without compensation (84:02). Irving called it a breach of faith. Robichaud saw it as correcting privileges that past politicians had handed out too freely. Both men were right about something, and neither would concede the other's version.

That fight, and a separate dispute over a money-losing fertilizer plant Irving had warned against and was later proven right about, hardened into a long war over whether one private citizen had become too powerful for an elected government to govern around (90:20). A federal Senate committee eventually summoned Irving to Ottawa, where a senator asked him directly whether anything that hurt New Brunswick also hurt his interests. He said yes. Asked whether the reverse was also true, that anything hurting his interests hurt the province, he said yes again (102:02). It was the plainest admission he ever made: he had spent forty years making himself indispensable, and the province had become dependent on the very thing it now feared.

Then the tax code changed. New federal capital gains rules set to take effect in 1972 threatened to hit his family with an estate tax bill payable in cash, on an empire held entirely in private companies with no public shares to sell (106:18). Rather than risk forcing his sons to dismantle the business to pay it, Irving and his wife, Harriet, flew to Bermuda two days before Christmas in 1971 and never moved back (108:01). He kept building anyway. At 58 he had already planted spruce seedlings on a ridge experts said was too poor to grow trees, with one forestry professor so certain he offered to eat his textbooks if the seedlings survived (67:05). They did. By 2017, the program had planted over one billion trees (119:59). Irving never lived to see most of them, which seems to have been the point all along: some bets are worth making even when you will not be there to collect.