Excerpt: A perfect marriage

The only newspaper monopoly in Canada worse than Postmedia’s in the West was the Irving family’s in New Brunswick. Four generations of Irving industrialists monopolized that province’s media and used it to benefit their business empire, which grew to employ one in every twelve working New Brunswickers and extended across Atlantic Canada into New England. The Irving name was everywhere in the Maritimes, adorning 700 service stations and a fleet of tanker trucks that delivered oil and gas.

What started out as 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. 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.

The family’s stranglehold on media in New Brunswick has been the target of government inquiries dating back to the 1970 Senate report on Mass Media, which described the province as a “journalistic disaster area.” The 1981 report of the Royal Commission on Newspapers recommended breaking up the family’s chain, along with other regional newspaper monopolies. The 2006 Senate report on News Media described the Irving empire as “an industrial-media complex that dominates the province.”

Investigative reporter Bruce Livesey noted in 2016 that “the Irvings’ media monopoly has been a source of frustration for decades in New Brunswick, largely over concerns about what their newspapers omit – specifically any critical coverage of the Irvings and their companies.” Mount Allison University professor Erin Steuter, a long-time Irving critic, noted in a study that the family’s newspapers “routinely publish their own press releases as news stories.” 

A study in the Canadian Journal of Communication found that the family used its “considerable editorial and advertising clout to lobby the government, and to advocate for particular policies and regulations that support both its short and long-term business interests [which] include changes to regulations impacting energy markets as well as rules impacting the forestry industry.” One “hardy perennial of the editorial pages of the Brunswick News papers,” it noted, was “the importance of maintaining low power rates for large industrial users. Indeed, few issues have received more frequent mention in recent years. More troublingly, none of these editorials carried any disclaimer about the fact that the owner of the papers was . . . the single largest electricity user in the province.” 

The fact that oil baron K.C. Irving had been gobbling up the province’s most influential news media was actually kept a closely-guarded secret for a quarter century. After Irving bought the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, its Evening Times-Globe sister paper, and local radio station CHSJ in 1944, he retained their management and made no announcement of his purchase. Irving repeated the manoeuvre a few years later when he bought both Moncton dailies, the morning Times and the evening Transcript. 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.” 

Irving quietly bought a minority interest in the province’s only other daily, the Fredericton Gleaner, in 1957 and again secretly took it over in 1968. This time, however, the purchase was dramatically revealed by New Brunswick Senator Charles McElman in a speech from the floor. Senator Keith Davey soon formed a Special Senate Committee on Mass Media to investigate it and the ever-tightening ownership of the rest of Canada’s media. It held hearings across Canada for five months and called 125 witnesses. It found that Irving controlled 92.7 percent of New Brunswick’s English-language daily newspaper circulation, which Davey’s 1970 report called “about as flagrant an example of abusing the public interest as you're likely to find in Canada.” 

The Combines Investigation Branch raided the offices of Irving’s newspapers the following year, along with his home and those of several of his executives, seizing almost 4,000 documents. Irving was charged with monopoly in 1972 by the Restrictive Trade Practices Commission, but he moved to Bermuda for tax purposes before his trial started, so the judge, prosecutor, and a stenographer had to fly there to take his testimony. Prior to his departure, Irving restructured his companies and transferred their control to his three sons. Irving was convicted at trial, fined $150,000, and ordered to sell both Moncton dailies within a year, but the conviction was overturned on appeal in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1976. 

The Irvings merged their two Moncton dailies in 1983 as the Times-Transcript, and after their father died in 1992, his sons closed the Saint John Evening Times-Globe in 2001. The family’s holdings were restructured in 2005 to give control of their four radio stations to son Jack, and by 2020 his Acadia Broadcasting had added another five in Nova Scotia and six more in Northern Ontario. The newspapers went to son J.K., who also headed the family’s forestry and transportation companies. Brunswick News had embarked on an expansion at the millennium, acquiring a dozen New Brunswick weeklies, half of which were published in French. Son Arthur headed Irving Oil. 

One thing the Irvings apparently could not stand was competition, judging by the cutthroat tactics they used to eliminate it. After Mark Leger quit the Telegraph-Journal to found the Saint John alt-weekly here in 2001, then expanded to Moncton in 2004, Brunswick News launched a similar newspaper called Metro Marquee that offered discounted or even free advertising. This predatory pricing forced Leger to sell out to Brunswick News, which closed Metro Marquee and expanded here into Fredericton. Despite promising not to, it watered down the alt-weekly’s critical content and demolished the wall it had kept between advertising and editorial. “The new owners exercised their editorial control immediately by cancelling the sex column,” noted Steuter, “and not long after the new editor was fired for running a cover story on breast feeding.”

That was nothing compared with what happened to Ken Langdon after he quit as publisher of the twice-weekly Woodstock Bugle-Observer in 2007 to start his own newspaper, the Carleton Free Press. Brunswick News secretly went to court and got a rare civil search warrant which allowed private investigators and forensic accountants to raid Langdon’s home in search of any company documents he may have taken with him. The searchers even examined the lingerie belonging to Langdon's wife, noted the New York Times. A court order that blocked Langdon from contacting Bugle-Observer advertisers, writers, readers, and distributors was lifted after a judge ruled that “Brunswick News Inc. cannot claim a monopoly over advertisers or its customers.” 

The first issue of the Carleton Free Press carried more than 15 pages of advertising, which soon grew to 20. The Canadian Association of Journalists awarded Langdon its 2008 President’s Award for contributions to journalism. Six months after it started, the Carleton Free Press had almost as many readers as the Bugle-Observer, which began to discount its advertising rates and slash its subscription prices “to try to drive the Carleton Free Press out of business,” noted the Toronto Sun. 

Langdon filed a complaint with the Competition Bureau alleging anti-competitive business practices and “abuse of dominance” by Brunswick News. “It’s hard for an advertiser to give you $500 for an ad when they can buy it for $200 from your competition,” he told the Canadian Press. The Competition Bureau looked into Langdon’s complaint but quickly dismissed it, saying it could not conclude that Brunswick News had “been engaged in the practice of anti-competitive acts or that there has been a substantial lessening or prevention of competition.” 

Predatory pricing could only be demonstrated, it added, if the dominant firm was pricing below its “average avoidable costs,” and it did not have such evidence. “Given that BNI is able to share resources such as printing, between several publications, their avoidable costs would be minimal.” While the Competition Bureau could not show that BNI’s behaviour constituted predatory pricing, its “need to focus our investigative efforts where they can be most effective in contributing to the prosperity of Canadians requires us to discontinue our investigation on this matter.” With an economic downturn starting, the Carleton Free Press ceased publication in October 2008 after not quite a year in print. A copy of its unpublished final front-page story, which chronicled its own demise, was obtained by the CBC. “Concentration of ownership and big money,” it said, “finally wore us down.” 

Many in New Brunswick rejoiced in early 2022 when the shock announcement was made that Postmedia was buying Brunswick News for $16.1 million. The Irving family was finally quitting the media business, Jim Irving announced in a news release, saying that the sale “represents an exit from the media business by J.D. Irving, Ltd.” Then it was pointed out that, under ownership by Postmedia, New Brunswick newspapers were likely going from bad to worse. St. Thomas University professor Michael Camp, a former Irving journalist, doubted that Postmedia would maintain all of its newly-acquired publications. “I regret very much that we're losing this local news presence,” he told the CBC. “I also feel badly for the people who will be displaced from their jobs. And I wonder about the future of journalism in New Brunswick.”

The one thing everybody missed, however, was that less than half of the purchase price was paid in cash, with the rest coming in the form of Postmedia shares. The more than 4 million shares the Irvings received put them among the company’s largest Canadian shareholders. It wasn’t so much a purchase as a merger, which was amply demonstrated when a second shock announcement was made a few months later that fourth-generation Jamie Irving would be named executive chairman of Postmedia’s board of directors when Paul Godfrey stepped down at the end of the year. 

That wasn’t even the final plot twist, as the 83-year-old Godfrey wasn’t really going anywhere either. A major shareholder himself from all of the stock options he had received while CEO, Godfrey would be staying on as a paid special adviser to the board and CEO Andrew MacLeod, which could include advocacy work with government. “I’m going to be there doing a lot of the same things that I’ve done in the past,” Godfrey told the Globe and Mail. “I realize a lot of people are going to think this is a retirement. I’m not retiring.” 

So Postmedia got New Brunswick, Canadians from coast to coast got an Irving to head their largest newspaper chain, and Godfrey got to stick around and steer home the third leg of his Postmedia rescue plan. There was certainly more work to be done. Despite the Liberal promise to introduce Australian-style legislation within 100 days to force Google and Facebook to bail out the country’s newspapers, the government was having trouble getting its planned Internet controls passed, so it was by no means a slam dunk. It had forced the Online Streaming Act through Parliament in 2021 by invoking closure to cut off debate, but members of the Senate, where the bill died with an election call, were more skeptical and in no hurry to pass it.