Are the Irvings Canada's biggest corporate welfare bums?

“Do you see, it’s over there,” said Gerry Lowe, pointing out across the cove as we stood on the shores of the Bay of Fundy on the outskirts of Saint John, New Brunswick, gazing into the distance towards the Canaport LNG terminal – its three enormous grey concrete storage tanks and jetty just visible in the midday gloom. It was a bitterly-cold overcast day in January of last year and Lowe, a garrulous 73-year-old Saint John city councilor, was giving me a guided tour of New Brunswick’s largest city in his black Ford sedan. I’d come to this hardscrabble burgh to research the Irvings – Canada’s seventh-richest family.

Keystone Be Darned: Canada Finds Oil Route Around Obama

So you’re the Canadian oil industry and you do what you think is a great thing by developing a mother lode of heavy crude beneath the forests and muskeg of northern Alberta. The plan is to send it clear to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast via a pipeline called Keystone XL. Just a few years back, America desperately wanted that oil.

Then one day the politics get sticky. In Nebraska, farmers don’t want the pipeline running through their fields or over their water source. U.S. environmentalists invoke global warming in protesting the project. President Barack Obama keeps siding with them, delaying and delaying approval. From the Canadian perspective, Keystone has become a tractor mired in an interminably muddy field.

Ship deal hits rocky shoals

OTTAWA - In all the delirium of competing for lucrative contracts to build new warships, we lost sight of the big question — what exactly are we building?

Irving Shipbuilding has recently bought full-page ads in The Chronicle Herald and the Ottawa Citizen to defend the high cost of building Arctic/offshore patrol ships in Halifax.

Irving payroll leans on taxpayers

OTTAWA — Nova Scotia taxpayers are subsidizing up to 8.5 per cent of Irving shipyard worker salaries over the course of the national shipbuilding program.

Amid media and opposition calls for openness, Irving Shipbuilding Inc., released new details about its $260-million loan from the province Tuesday.

Irving tries to keep contract details secret

OTTAWA — Irving Shipbuilding Inc. is fighting through Canada’s federal court to keep its shipbuilding contract with the government secret.

The federal government has received an access to information request to release the umbrella agreements it signed with Irving and Seaspan Marine, the two main companies pegged to build Canada’s next fleet of ships.