| J.D. Irving, Limited | |
| Type: | Private |
| Foundation: | , in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, Canada |
| Location City: | Saint John, New Brunswick |
| Location Country: | Canada |
| Area Served: | Worldwide with operations throughout North America. |
| Founder: | James Dergavel Irving |
| Owner: | James K. Irving |
| Num Employees: | 20,000 |
| Parent: | Irving Group of Companies |
| Divisions: | Irving Forest Products & Services Irving Transportation Services Irving Shipbuilding & Industrial Fabrication Irving Retail & Distribution Services Irving Consumer Products Irving Industrial Equipment & Construction Irving Specialty Printing Irving Tissue |
| Footnotes: | [1] [2] [3] |
J. D. Irving Limited (JDI) is a privately owned conglomerate company headquartered in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. It is a part of the Irving Group of Companies and consists of various subsidiaries such as Irving Tissue, Irving Equipment, Kent Building Supplies, New Brunswick Railway, New Brunswick Southern Railway, Eastern Maine Railway, Maine Northern Railway, Brunswick News, Acadia Broadcasting, Irving Shipbuilding, and Cavendish Farms, among others. It is involved in many industries including forestry, forestry products, agriculture, food processing, transportation, and shipbuilding. JDI along with Irving Oil, Ocean Capital Investments and Brunswick News, forms the bulk of the Irving Group of Companies, which groups the interests of the Irving family.
J.D. Irving Limited (JDI) traces its roots to a sawmill operated in Bouctouche, New Brunswick by its namesake, James Dergavel Irving.[1] J.D. Irving's operations were passed to his children, one of whom, Kenneth Colin Irving, assumed majority ownership and used JDI to expand into pulp and paper and other forestry-related businesses between the 1920s and 1940s.
In the post-war years, JDI acquired pulp mills in Saint John and upstate New York, as well as sawmills throughout New Brunswick. During the 1950s, JDI took control of a shipyard in Saint John and started several trucking companies and heavy industry companies like Irving Equipment to satisfy the growing needs of the company.
In the 1970s and 1980s, JDI expanded into trucking with its Scot Truck subsidiary based in Debert, NS. Now called Midland Transport and based in Dieppe, NB, it is joined by sister companies Midland Courier (Dieppe), Sunbury Transport (Fredericton) and RST Industries (Saint John).
JDI is also a shipbuilder in Canada with ownership of shipyards in Halifax, Liverpool, Shelburne, and Georgetown.
As a large regional industrial conglomerate, J.D. Irving Ltd. subsidiaries have been the focus of several notable incidents:
J.D. Irving’s ownership of most major media outlets in New Brunswick has led to ongoing concern regarding control of the media. A report from the Canadian Senate in 2006, on media control in Canada singled out New Brunswick because of the Irving companies' ownership of all English-language daily newspapers in the province, including the Telegraph-Journal. Senator Joan Fraser, author of the Senate report, stated, "We didn't find anywhere else in the developed world a situation like the situation in New Brunswick."[4] The report went further, stating, "the Irvings' corporate interests form an industrial-media complex that dominates the province" to a degree "unique in developed countries." At the Senate hearing, journalists and academics cited Irving newspapers' lack of critical reporting on the family's influential businesses.[5]
On multiple occasions, J. D. Irving has attacked CBC News and Jacques Poitras,[6] a journalist and author who is employed by CBC as their New Brunswick provincial affairs reporter.[7] In 2014, Poitras published Irving vs. Irving: Canada's Feuding Billionaires and the Stories They Won't Tell, which Bruce Livesey of Canada's National Observer described as detailing about "the recent history of the Irvings' media holdings, as well as the deteriorating relationship among the Irving brothers and cousins as they squabble over the empire's wealth and future direction."[6] On December 2, 2015, Poitras published an article about Eilish Cleary's sudden leave from her position as Chief Medical Officer of Health in New Brunswick, noting that Cleary had been studying glyphosate, a herbicide recently labelled as "probably carcinogenic to humans" by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, at the time. In the article, Poitras briefly mentioned that glyphosate was used by J. D. Irving and NB Power.[8] Two days later, J. D. Irving spokesperson Mary Keith released a "sharply worded" statement in response,[9] calling the article a "sensational story" and accusing CBC News of presenting "an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory as fact," further claiming that CBC "falsely implied that J. D. Irving, Limited (JDI) is or was involved in some sort of conspiracy against Dr. Cleary because JDI uses glyphosate".[10] In their statement, Irving also demanded that CBC "immediately remove the story from their website, publish a full retraction, and apologize for their appalling behavior". Poitras responded back on Twitter with a tweet stating, "We stand by our story."[9] [11] In 2016 and 2017, J. D. Irving made two attempts to have Poitras banned from writing about the Irvings and their operations by filing complaints to the CBC ombudsman; both complaints were reviewed and dismissed. According to Esther Enkin, who reviewed the second complaint, restricting Poitras from writing about the Irvings or using his personal Twitter account "would amount to a form of censorship".[6]
The following is a list of notable divisions of J.D. Irving, Ltd.
East Isle Shipyard is a shipbuilding facility in Georgetown, Prince Edward Island and owned by Irving.[12] The small shipyard is located on Water Street with single slipway along Georgetown Harbour. It is the sole shipbuilding facility in the province.
It was founded as Bathurst Marine in Bathurst, New Brunswick in 1961,[13] before moving to Georgetown in 1965.[14] The facility has operated in various names but with current name since the 1990s.[14]
The yard built trawlers in the 1960s, the diversified in the 1970s, before it began to specialize in tugs in the 1990s.[14]
In 2010, the shipyard laid off staff due to lack of orders.[15]
Notable ships built here include: