Irving vs. Irving: Canada's Feuding Billionaires And The Stories They Won't Tell - Hardcover

Poitras, Jacques

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9780670067718: Irving vs. Irving: Canada's Feuding Billionaires And The Stories They Won't Tell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670067717 ISBN 13: 9780670067718

Publisher: Viking, 2014

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A Remarkable, ambitious family, a business empire, an da media monopoly.

They are Canada’s third wealthiest family, the fifth-largest private landowner in the U.S.A. They have a monopoly on New Brunswick’s English-language print media and billions of dollars in offshore accounts.

They are the Irvings. And they have always placed a premium on discretion and family unity. They built their empire—which includes Canada’s largest refinery, soon to be linked by pipeline to Alberta’s oil fields—by remaining private. Irving vs. Irving tells the story of how these ambitious, often ruthless entrepreneurs came to dominate the economic and political affairs of Atlantic Canada, and how they learned to love the property that perplexed them most: their media monopoly.

The Irvings’ control of all of New Brunswick’s English daily newspapers often allowed the family’s business pursuits to escape journalistic scrutiny. Readers frequently wondered what wasn’t in the newspaper, such as the Irving’s lobbying for their logging interests and the sinking of their tanker loaded with PCBs.

In Irving vs. Irving, veteran reporter Jacques Poitras uses the empire’s media holdings to examine previously untold episodes of this family epic from patriarch K.C. Irving’s manipulation of his mother’s affections to a Shakespearean confrontation between generations.

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About the Author:

JACQUES POITRAS has been the provincial affairs reporter for CBC News in New Brunswick since 2000. He is the author of three previous books: The Right Fight: Bernard Lord and the Conservative Dilemma, Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy, which was a finalist for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, and Imaginary Line: Life on an Unfinished Border, which was a finalist for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. Irving vs. Irving was shortlisted for the National Business Book Award and won the Atlantic Independent Booksellers' Choice Award for 2015.
Online: http://twitter.com/poitrasbook

The newspapers would eventually falter in telling that story of family upheaval and business transformation, because they were inextricably part of it. Next to the other Irving operations − pulp mills, the oil refinery, logging operations, trucking, shipbuilding – the papers were tiny. But K.C.’s death, Neil Reynolds’s arrival as editor, and the popularization of the internet would transform them, to the point that they would prove contentious themselves when the empire began to fracture. As rivalries and resentment grew among the next generation of Irvings, one of their own – a great-grandchild of K.C. – would take direct control of the news business for the first time. This in turn would revive the debate about editorial control, even as a rift in the family grew wider.

By 2013 it was clear that K.C. had failed, with is will, to impose unity and harmony on his family – that he had failed, as the 1993 headline had put it, to make them “behave themselves.”

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