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Whispers that Arthur Irving, reluctant to fully cede power, had been unhappy with the business direction that Kenneth was taking, and fired his son. But in the wake of his leaving Saint John, there were also whispers that challenged that narrative. Kenneth was well-respected, seen as a modernizing, innovative force within the family's third generation, an Irving with a worldly gaze and big plans to expand and diversify the energy business. But you don't have to work for the family to be tied to its fortunes – or to have an incentive not to speak too freely about the sudden, shocking disappearance of an Irving son. "Like the Bay of Fundy, they are big and deep and they aren't going anywhere." A Senate report once estimated that Irving companies employ one in 12 people in New Brunswick. The Irving empire includes everything from shipyards and refineries, to pulp mills, railway lines and convenience stores – the family's name stamped, in tall navy letters, on what seems like nearly every money-making enterprise in one of Canada's poorest provinces."The Irvings are a fact of life," says Hugh (Ted) Flemming, the MLA for Rothesay, the riding next door to Saint John. With a private fortune estimated at $8-billion, the family owns New Brunswick's three major daily newspapers, radio stations and a chain of weeklies. But in a sturdy, tight-knit province where the Irvings keep the lights on but store their secrets safely in the shadows, most of what happened that day, and the echoes that followed it, is the stuff more of rumour than fact. It's been the subject of newspaper columns and book chapters. Then, he left for Boston, because an Irving could not be locked up in a psychiatric hospital in New Brunswick.
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He gave his doctor a quick tour, and feebly joked about an errant walk into a door, which fooled no one. Perhaps he also wanted to be with the engineers and technicians he so admired before the chance slipped away for good. He says he wanted his doctor to understand this part of his life. He shouldn't have gone this time – "What the hell was I thinking?" he says now – not looking the way he did. Along the way, he insisted on a detour – one last visit to his family's refinery, just up from the harbour on the city's east side.Īs CEO, he had liked to go to its central control room sometimes, late at night, to watch the computer screens, listen to the two-way radio chatter, and discuss conversion rates and temperatures with the plant operators. Later, that life-altering day, after Tasha did her best over breakfast to distract their daughters from their father's bruises with a well-meaning fiction about bumps in the night, after Kenneth's psychiatrist arrived from out of town and insisted his patient be hospitalized for his own safety, Kenneth was driven to the airport. Read Paul Waldie’s 2013 story about that donation Kenneth Irving’s $2-million home in New Brunswick was donated to serve as a national centre to protect Canadian waterways. He has returned only twice to Saint John, the royal seat of the Irving empire, and then only to pack up his house and finalize the donation of the 50-acre estate to an environmental non-profit. to his second son, Arthur, and then to Kenneth. He would never sit again behind the desk that had been handed down from K.C. That was the last night Kenneth Irving would spend in the house he had built beside the river he loved. "Did you fall?" she asked, though she knew he hadn't. She found Kenneth, slouched over the kitchen table, his hands holding his head. to an empty space beside her in bed, and raced downstairs.
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He punched himself in the eyes until his sockets were a deep purple, until blood vessels had burst and his knuckles were raw. Later, he would tell one of his daughters that he took out his rage on the one person he blamed for his problems. He does remember that the pain was intoxicating. He doesn't clearly remember raising his fist. And yet, alone in the dark, all he felt was anger and despair. By every standard, Kenneth knew he was a lucky man.
ALISON HALL INSIDE EDITION WINDOWS
From the windows of his house, he could see the grand sweep of the Kennebecasis River and the pine trees that he liked to plant in the mornings before heading off to Irving Oil, to take his place in the onetime office of his storied grandfather, K.C. His wife and two youngest daughters were sleeping upstairs. A few hours before dawn on April 17, 2010, Kenneth Irving, a favoured son in Canada's third-wealthiest family, and the CEO of a multibillion-dollar energy empire, sat at the kitchen table in his forest-framed mansion outside Saint John.