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Back to K.C. Irving: Competing with Giants, with Shane Parrish.

Why Did New Brunswick Want More Than One K.C. Irving?

Shane Parrish says people called K.C. Irving the greatest thing that had ever happened to New Brunswick, and then said the province could use four or five more like him.

An ordinary New Brunswicker could wake up in a household heated by Irving oil, fill the car at an Irving station, read an Irving newspaper over lunch, and, in one working household out of 12, bring home an Irving paycheck. New Brunswick had spent decades desperate for money, jobs, mills, ships, and investment, and for somebody willing to bet on the province when much of the outside world would not. K.C. Irving had done all of that on a scale no one else came close to matching.

The yes-but came next. He had built the businesses, thousands of families depended on him, and New Brunswick was richer because he had. One person added that the province would be much greater for everybody if a few other Irvings existed to cut him down to size. For years he had worked to make himself less dependent on other people. New Brunswick was asking what happened when so many people depended on him.

Grokipedia·Shane Parrish·New Brunswick

Transcript

K.C. Irving: Competing with Giants ·

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish

More from this episode

  1. How Did K.C. Irving Handle a Missing Oil Delivery?Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving handled a missing oil delivery by answering the call himself and phoning back until the oil was in the house.
  2. How Did K.C. Irving Get Gasoline When Imperial Oil Cut Him Off?Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving went looking for his own gasoline after Imperial Oil cut him off and expected him to stick to selling cars.
  3. Why Did K.C. Irving Refuse a Loan His Father Would Guarantee?Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving refused a line of credit unless it stood in his own name, even though his father would have guaranteed the loan.
  4. Why Did K.C. Irving Start Irving Oil?Shane Parrish says K.C.
  5. Why Did K.C. Irving Keep Expanding During the Great Depression?Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving kept expanding through the Great Depression because fewer people were trying to grow and there was less competition.
  6. Why Did K.C. Irving Buy a Ship When the Railway Raised His Rates?Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving bought his own tanker after Canadian National Railway raised the rates on his oil and refused to treat him like Imperial Oil.
  7. Why Did K.C. Irving Keep Cutting Timber He Could Not Sell?Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving kept cutting timber through the Depression and stopped selling it, while competitors laid people off and waited.
  8. How Did K.C. Irving's Veneer Plant Help Build the Mosquito Bomber?Shane Parrish says the first part of K.C. Irving's business transformed by the war was Canada Veneers, a small veneer company he had purchased the year before.
  9. Why Did K.C. Irving Count the Trees Before Buying a Forest?Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving counted the trees himself because he would not buy a defunct railway's forest until his own count matched the inspectors.
  10. How Much Was K.C. Irving Worth in 1948?Shane Parrish says Canadian Business put K.C. Irving on its cover in February 1948 and guessed his fortune at about $100 million. By 1948, K.C.
  11. What Did Harrison McCain Learn From K.C. Irving?Shane Parrish says Harrison McCain reduced what he learned from K.C. Irving to one sentence: don't ever be satisfied.
  12. Why Did K.C. Irving Start Planting Spruce at 58?Shane Parrish says K.C.
  13. Why Did K.C. Irving Turn Down British Petroleum's Refinery Deal?Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving walked away from British Petroleum because it wanted the right to buy Irving Oil when he retired or died.
  14. Did K.C. Irving Take Dividends From His Newspapers?Shane Parrish says K.C.
  15. Why Did K.C. Irving Say It Was Too Expensive to Die in Canada?Shane Parrish says K.C.
  16. Why Was K.C. Irving's Newspaper Ownership Not a Crime?Shane Parrish says a monopoly was not automatically a crime. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled the government had to prove that K.C.
  17. How Many Trees Did K.C. Irving Plant?Shane Parrish says K.C. Irving's spruce program passed one billion trees on land experts said would not grow them. In 1957, 58-year-old K.C.

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