The Irving name was everywhere in the Maritimes, adorning 700 gas stations and a fleet of tanker trucks. What started with one gas station in 1924 turned into a web of more than 300 privately-held companies engaged in oil and gas, forestry, real estate, retailing, construction, shipping, trucking, shipbuilding, and other businesses. The Irvings owned sawmills, pulp and paper mills, hardware stores, marine terminals, shipyards, and oil tankers. They owned Canada’s largest oil refinery, which accounted for more than 40 percent of the country’s petroleum exports. By 2008, the secretive family was the second richest in Canada, behind only the even more secretive Thomsons, who were perhaps not coincidentally also a newspaper family. By 2022, the Irvings owned all three of the province’s daily newspapers, eighteen of its 25 community newspapers, and four of its radio stations. ... A biography noted that Irving’s newspapers “shied away from any meaningful investigation of industrial pollution in New Brunswick” while maintaining a “long-standing conspiracy of silence about Irving’s business dealings,” including “secrecy about its own ownership.” Irving’s picture was never to appear in the newspapers, noted journalist Jacques Poitras, and if an oil spill or similar mishap involved Irving Oil, it was to be referred to as simply “a local oil company.”

— The Postmedia Effect by Marc Edge