Richler Family Tree

This week, a professional cleaner specializing in mopping up after suicides, homicides and unattended deaths spent days vigorously scouring the premises, the hose of a high-powered air-cleaning device designed to clear the stench of death hovering out from the covered window.

Known around town as Dick, Oland was a bright, energetic but difficult son of the Moosehead beer Olands, one of a handful of wealthy New Brunswick families that have divided the province into lucrative fiefdoms of endeavour and that, over the years, have come to settle in the old-money bedroom community of Rothesay, 20 minutes up a pockmarked highway northeast of Saint John.

Little known outside the Maritimes, Rothesay once laid claim to some of the country’s highest incomes per capita until the town was forced to amalgamate with less affluent neighbours in 1998. “What is Rothesay?” the novelist Mordecai Richler once asked a Saint John cabbie in a droll Maritime travel piece written at about that time. “It is a very good neighbourhood,” the cabbie told him. “The Irvings live there.” “Welcome to the feudal Maritimes,” Richler wrote. “Whatever isn’t owned by the Irvings in the Maritimes belongs to the McCains, or has no redeeming value.”

Well, don’t forget the Olands. Indeed, by the standards of Rothesay, the Irvings are newcomers. “The Irvings are new money,” one Rothesay resident told Maclean’s . “They are old.” The brewing family has for generations lived here alongside the rest of Saint John’s upper class, some of them, such as the Crosby molasses dynasty, lesser known west of New Brunswick, perhaps, but still big fish. Together the families hold enormous influence over the region, as Dick Oland himself recognized. “New Brunswick’s free enterprise system has become a 20th-century version of the Family Compact,” he once told a reporter, a reference to the Tory clans who through sheer cronyism once controlled Upper Canada.