Kenneth Colin Irving

Kenneth Colin (KC) Irving , OC , ONB (born March 14, 1899 , Bouctouche ( New Brunswick ); † December 13, 1992 in Saint John (New Brunswick) ) was one of the leading entrepreneurs in the Atlantic provinces of Canada with the conglomerate J. D. Irving . He is one of the industrial magnates of the 20th century .

Life

He was born in Bouctouche, a small town dominated by his father's sawmill. Even in his youth, KC Irving was considered a brutal intimidator. His first entrepreneurial activities started early, but were overshadowed by the First World War . Together with some friends he wanted to register for military service, but his father forbade that. Instead, this registered him to attend Acadia University in Wolfville , Nova Scotia . However, Irving left the university before graduation and moved to British Columbia before returning to Bouctouche. His father was unable to counter his second attempt to enlist for military service, and so he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force as a fighter pilot.

As a young man, Irving sold Ford automobiles in Kent County and founded Irving Oil in 1924 during the dawn of the automobile age before moving to Saint John , New Brunswick. Irving Oil started with a small network of rural gas stations and grew to become the largest fuel dealer in the Atlantic Provinces, East Quebec and North New England, with several thousand gas stations and stores, Canada's largest petroleum refinery , a fleet of tankers and a network of fuel depots.

Irving Oil financed most of Irving's other businesses. A few years after Irving Oil was founded, in 1933, after the death of his father, he also took over his sawmill in Bouctouche, JD Irving Limited (JDI), which he then expanded. In 1938 he acquired Canada Veneers , which enabled him to enter the war economy with veneers. Eventually he acquired the New Brunswick Railway Company, whose enormous land he added to his company. With Irving Pulp and Paper Ltd, founded in 1951, he monopolized the relevant industries in the province. In 1971 he left the province and moved to Bermuda . In 1987 a theater in the John Flemming Forestry Center in Fredericton was named after him.

JDI has long been the largest landowner in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Maine . Its forests feed the needs of several pulp and paper mills as well as sawmills, which in turn supply the company's own newspapers, handkerchief and diaper factories as far as Ontario as well as in the American states of Maine and New York. In addition, the family holds a monopoly on newspapers in the province of New Brunswick.

During World War II and the postwar period, Irving expanded, buying shipyards, setting up construction companies, food processing companies, radio and TV stations, home improvement stores, and transportation companies - anything that could be vertically integrated into the empire. This means that every one of Irving's companies acquired the products and services of other Irving's companies, and so the profits remained in the conglomerate . The legality of such an expansion of private power over an entire province and thus a departure from democratic rules of the community was occasionally an issue of the Canadian federal government. On-site investigations, including those relating to the ecological problems of the company's construction, always fizzled out.

Irving was married and had three sons, James , Arthur and John .

Web links

• Kenneth Colin Irving ( English, French ) In: The Canadian Encyclopedia .