Capturing life in the shadows of Canada’s largest oil refinery

Grow­ing up in the rur­al out­skirts of Saint John, New Brunswick, Chris Dono­van gazed up at the sky, watch­ing the smoke­stacks at Irv­ing Oil Refin­ery expel end­less swells of filth into the crys­tal blue sky. With the inno­cence of youth, he asked his father if they made all the world’s clouds. ​“No,” his father replied. ​“They make money.” 

Dono­van remem­bers: ​“The indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion of the city didn’t feel excep­tion­al as a child, it was just the world I knew.” In that same way, he first picked up a cam­era to pho­to­graph back­yard wildlife, unknow­ing­ly root­ing him­self in a prac­tice that has come full cir­cle with the recent pub­li­ca­tion of The Cloud Fac­to­ry (GOST Books) – a grip­ping por­trait of neo-feu­dal­ism built on the backs of Canada’s work­ing poor. 

The sto­ry begins in 2014, when Dono­van began doc­u­ment­ing the com­mu­ni­ties in Saint John, who live under the shad­ows of the Irv­ing Group, the fifth wealth­i­est fam­i­ly in Cana­da and fifth largest landown­er in North Amer­i­ca. Unlike oth­er dynas­ties, the fam­i­ly dom­i­nates a region rather than a glob­al indus­try, build­ing an empire across New Brunswick’s oil, forestry, trans­port, agribusi­ness, and media worth an esti­mat­ed 14.5 bil­lion Cana­di­an dollars (£7.96 billion).

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The empire began in the 1920s under scion Ken­neth Col­in Irv­ing, whose three sons James, Arthur, and Jack. Fol­low­ing his death in 1992, they split the empire he had built among them­selves. By 2024, all three had died, the state of the hold­ings hid­den from view, much like the fam­i­ly them­selves. What is vis­i­ble, as Dono­van shows, is the huge, con­tin­u­ing effects that they have had on the area. 

“This project is entire­ly about the com­mu­ni­ty for me,” Dono­van says. ​“The indus­tri­al forces that influ­ence the polit­i­cal econ­o­my are just a back­drop to life in this place. The boss­es of the com­pa­ny town are an unseen force. How do you pho­to­graph the unseen – the class that has pur­chased the right to not be seen? There is no sim­ple answer to that question.” 

Amid the des­o­late land­scape of indus­tri­al waste, fam­i­lies often found them­selves bound to silence, fos­tered by the elite class­es. Dono­van, who got his start in 2016 as a pho­to­jour­nal­ist for Saint John’s dai­ly news­pa­per, the Tele­graph-Jour­nal – then owned by the Irv­ing Group – saw that cul­ture himself.

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He remem­bers: ​“Grow­ing up you knew about the ​‘Irv­ing papers’ and what that meant. It wasn’t until I worked at one of them that I realised the extent of implic­it cen­sor­ship tak­ing place cul­tur­al­ly in these insti­tu­tions. It was all unspo­ken, but you knew not to crit­i­cise the bosses.”

In 2018, res­i­dents in East Saint John had to be evac­u­at­ed after a butane leak at the Irv­ing Oil Refin­ery – the largest in Cana­da. For 17 hours, the explo­sive, tox­ic chem­i­cal poured into the air. In the wake of the inci­dent, Irv­ing Oil was fined just 200,000 Cana­di­an dol­lars (£110,540). The com­pa­ny pur­chased 20 homes near the site and tore them down to estab­lish a pro­tect­ed area between the refin­ery and the community. 

By that time Dono­van had left the Tele­graph-Jour­nal, but remem­bers how a sec­ond inci­dent, an explo­sion at the refin­ery on Thanks­giv­ing Day in 2018 that left dozens of work­ers injured, was report­ed at the time. ​“The news­pa­per ran a head­line on the front page that read: ​‘Thanks­giv­ing Mir­a­cle,’ cel­e­brat­ing that nobody was killed,” he says. ​“That was one of the times that the veil real­ly came down for the com­mu­ni­ty as well, in terms of an obvi­ous con­trol of the narrative.” 

For Dono­van, The Cloud Fac­to­ry is both an act of protest and a refusal to com­ply with the cul­ture of silence that afflicts Saint John’s media. ​“It is because I love this place that I need to bring atten­tion to the harm being caused to it envi­ron­men­tal­ly and social­ly by indus­tri­al giants who pri­ori­tise prof­it over human health,” he says. ​“I under­stand what hap­pens to monop­o­lised economies in the long-term. It nev­er ends well. Per­haps it is too late to issue a warn­ing on that front, but I feel I must try.”

The Cloud Fac­to­ry by Chris Dono­van is pub­lished by GOST Books.

Miss Rosen is a free­lance arts and pho­tog­ra­phy writer, fol­low her on X.

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