Truth and Honour

by Greg Marquis

  The battle over the distribution of natural gas once again had Oland speaking out against monopoly and the suffocating power of the Irving interests. He warned a legislative committee in 1998 that giving a monopoly in energy to either the Irvings or NB Power would hurt consumers and require more government regulation in the name of public interest.46 Kenneth Irving, whose partnership with Westcoast Energy Inc. was called Maritimes NRG, wanted to grow Irving Oil as an energy provider. His cousin Jim, who ran the empire’s forestry operations, wanted something more specific: the right to bypass any distribution fees and buy gas directly from Maritimes and Northeast for the J. D. Irving pulp mill in Saint John and a planned gas-powered generating plant. J. D. Irving had told a legislative committee that large industrial customers including NB Power would consume more than 80 percent of available gas. Oland and his fellow investors were no doubt disappointed when the mayor and common council of Saint John narrowly voted to endorse the Irving proposal as they saw it as most beneficial for the area’s struggling economy.47

  By September 1999, investors faced a challenge in the need to raise considerably more capital to maintain their share in the renamed consortium, Enbridge Gas New Brunswick— named after the Calgary parent company Enbridge Inc.—or be bought out.48 SaskEnergy Inc. and Co-op Atlantic were also interested in controlling gas distribution. Irving eventually lost its Vancouver partner. Enbridge ended up winning the distribution rights for natural gas in the province by default. A year earlier, the government had promised single end-use customers, such as the Irving Oil refinery, the right to purchase gas directly from M&NEP, bypassing the middleman that would otherwise control distribution. A report on the province’s energy situation in 2010 revealed that although Enbridge had invested $400 million in New Brunswick, it had signed up only ten-thousand customers and was losing money.49 As McCain had predicted, permitting the Irvings to opt out of the Enbridge distribution system contributed to the gas company’s debt load and had the effect of driving up rates for natural gas, and discouraging small and mid-sized customers from signing up.50

  Richard, although from a privileged background, appeared to be a man’s man in that he loved to work with his hands, use tools, and fix things. He liked to work hard, and play hard. He wore suits made in Italy and shopped at Harry Rosen in Toronto. Some described his business style as aggressive and his personality as abrasive. Others have suggested that, when applied to community projects, his forceful personality ensured results. His son’s July 7, 2011, interview with the police revealed that at Wood Gundy, there was a dedicated telephone to handle Oland’s investment instructions, and if the phone was not answered after three rings, there would be hell to pay. An associate described him as “a very capable guy…but there would be a few people, after he got through with them, with footmarks on their backs.51 The playing hard manifested in competitive sailing, salmon fishing, and downhill skiing. Some academics might attribute these costly sporting activities to the elite’s need to display conspicuous consumption in order to differentiate themselves from the middle and working classes. But for outgoing personalities such as Richard Oland, the competition of sport may have been the flip side of a hard-driving business style. Just prior to his death, he took part in a salmon-fishing trip with New Brunswick businessman David Ganong and long-time friend A. W. (Bill) McMackin of Rothesay.

  In recent years, Oland’s real passion was competitive yacht racing where, according to his mistress, he could win and have “a great accomplishment.” Oland began sailing out of the Rothesay Yacht Club as a boy and over the years gained experience on increasingly larger craft. Like many wealthy families in Rothesay and Saint John, the Olands enjoyed sailing on the scenic Kennebecasis and St. John Rivers and socializing at the Rothesay Yacht Club and the Royal Kennebecasis Yacht Club (RKYC). In 2008, Dennis, who as a boy had spent many hours at the Rothesay Yacht Club, reminisced about the family boat Aloma II, which had been built in Sydney, Nova Scotia, in 1910. For many years, the craft was based out of the RKYC and used for Moosehead office parties and brewery promotion events. Aloma II was destroyed by fire at St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2008, prompting Dennis Oland’s nostalgic essay, which described his father as happy and relaxed when on the water: “With my father as captain, you could always count on a big adventure for every trip and he never let us down.”52

  In the years prior to his death, Oland was well known in competitive sailing circles as owner of Vela Veloce (“sail fast”). The beautiful blue-hulled vessel was designed by Reichal Pugh and built by Davie Norris Boatbuilding of New Zealand with a lightweight carbon-fibre composite hull. It is classified as a Southern Cross 52 and is capable of reaching a speed of twenty-five knots. The yacht draws 3.5 metres of water, is equipped with a fifty-six-horsepower engine and sports comfortable berths, a galley, and an enclosed head. The sale price was $695,000 USD. It requires a minimum crew of six but usually raced with fifteen. The high-tech sails were manufactured by Quantum of Spain. Competitive sailing at this level is an expensive hobby as a racing yacht, in addition to being constructed and maintained, must be crewed. Oland, who served as skipper, used a mixture of talented amateurs and professionals in races. In 2009, he entered into a race from Auckland to Tauranga, New Zealand, which the Vela Veloce crew won. After arriving in the Atlantic, it placed fifth in the Annapolis, Maryland, to Newport, Rhode Island, race. In July 2009, it was the first Canadian vessel to complete the annual Marblehead, Massachusetts, to Halifax match and the fifth overall. A few days later, Saint John residents watched Vela Veloce pass under the bridges at Reversing Falls, the mouth of the St. John River. The crew used a three-thousand-pound counterweight so that the sailboat would lean to one side, allowing its 34.6-metre mast to pass under the bridges.

  In 2010, Oland entered Vela Veloce in the Royal Ocean Racing Club (RORC) Caribbean 600. Under Captain Scott Innes-Jones, the vessel placed second in the race and won the CSA division. That year, the boat won best overall performance at the Rolex US-IRC national championship at Newport. In 2011, Dick was awarded the Canadian Yachting Association’s Gerry Roufs Award at Toronto for achievement in international offshore racing. In January 2011, his boat, under the direction of Richard Clarke and Stuart Bannatyne, did well at the IRC competition at Key West, Florida. The following month it placed fourth in the RORC Caribbean 600.53 Early in 2011, the yacht triumphed at the Key West Race Week, where a victorious Richard was described as exhibiting a “Cheshire cat grin.” In this regatta, professionals, Clarke at the helm and Bannatyne in charge of tactics, were key.54 Comments posted on Seahorse magazine’s website in the wake of Richard Oland’s death suggest that in the yachting world, as opposed to the business world and within his family, Richard was considered a nice guy. As he explained to a reporter in 2010: “My role in this whole thing has really been putting together the right team, making sure you’ve got the right players in each position.”55 Vela Veloce was for sale at the time of Oland’s death, with an asking price of $850,000. He was working on securing a newer and faster yacht from Spain, a project that consumed some of the work day of his two employees.56

  Oland’s mistress of several years, Diana Sedlacek, is the daughter of John and Lina (Arsenault) Virgin of Saint John. According to the city directory, in the 1960s and 1970s American-born John was a welder at Saint John Drydock and Shipyard, an Irving-owned enterprise on Courtenay Bay east of uptown Saint John. The Virgin family lived at 17 Flecknell Avenue, a quiet cul-de-sac in a modest neighbourhood close to the Saint John campus of the New Brunswick Community College. John was also an old-time fiddler and played with various country-music groups. A Second World War veteran, John passed away in 2006 in his mid-eighties. Diana grew up with two sisters and two brothers. Facebook posts from 2011 onwards list her favourite activities as downhill skiing, gardening, cooking, and kitchen design. She also followed the Southern Ocean Racing Council (an interest of Richard Oland’s), posted in early 2011 on Vela Veloce, and made references to a trip to Spain that
she took in May with her married lover. In Saint John, Diana worked as an interior designer and a real estate agent, including at the firm associated with Lesley Oland, Dennis’s ex-wife. In his 2011 police interview, Dennis alleged that his sister had found Viagra in the family home: “My parents have not had sex in a long time, so there is no need for the Viagra.” Given that his father was away from home for much of the year on sailing and other trips, Dennis speculated that Richard was involved with Sedlacek or possibly other women.57

  At the time of Oland’s murder, Diana lived on scenic Darlings Island east of Saint John with her husband, Jiri, a retired business executive. Much less parochial that the typical New Brunswick businessman, Jiri had been a corporate executive for Bata Shoes, founded in what is now the Czech Republic, in the 1890s. As part of first a European and then global expansion, a branch of the firm, which also became involved in other sectors, located to Ontario in the 1930s. Sedlacek joined Bata in England in the 1950s where he worked with Thomas J. Bata, who later moved to Canada. The global headquarters for Bata Shoes was located in Toronto in 1964. By the 1980s, when the company was at its peak in Canada, it was a major retailer with more than two hundred stores. It also owned a chain of running-shoes outlets known as Athletes World (later purchased by Canadian Tire). In 1989, with the end of the Cold War, Jiri, as director of corporate planning, spoke to the media on the company’s planned return to Czechoslovakia, where its operations had been nationalized by the Communist government in the late 1940s. That year, he and another Bata executive met Václav Havel, the first president of democratic Czechoslovakia after the Cold War. A 1991 story on Bata’s triumphant return to Czechoslovakia described Jiri as a retired executive who had been working “closely with Mr. Bata on the Czechoslovak project,” which involved not only investing in the former homeland but also advising on the privatization of the government-owned manufacturing and retail sectors.58 Both Bata and Athletes World are no longer part of the Canadian retail scene, but the company retains a global manufacturing and retail presence. Jiri met his wife, Diana, who was more than two decades his junior, in Toronto. The couple moved from Ontario, where their son, Jeremy, was born in the late 1980s, to New Brunswick, Diana’s native province, after he retired.59 Jeremy graduated from Rothesay Netherwood School in 2005, and in 2011 from the Moncton Flight College. Since then, he has worked as a commercial pilot in British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

  Richard’s only son, Dennis, was born in 1968. Two decades later, he was the object of media attention as a result of an accident that took place when he was hauling a trailer from Rothesay to Ottawa, carrying his father’s horse Apocalypse. The twenty-year-old swerved to avoid an animal and the vehicle left the road and ended up in the ditch. Dennis, who was on his way to Ottawa’s Capital Classic, was not injured, but his father’s $25,000 racehorse had to be put down (given what was later revealed about Richard’s temperament, this probably did not go over well at home).60 According to his mother, Dennis’s first job was delivering newspapers. He bought a small motorcycle with his earnings and became interested in working on engines. Tinkering was a passion he shared with his father and through the years they repaired “boat motors, cars, stoves, and washing machines.” As a child, he enjoyed boating, summer camp, and horseback riding; like his father, he had a practical bent and on top of being able to fix motors, he could also maintain canoes and boats.61 He continued these pursuits with his own children in later years. As a teenager, Dennis worked at a YMCA/YWCA summer camp as a canoeing instructor and as a canoeing director at Camp Glenburn, an idyllic spot on the Kingston Peninsula. At age eighteen he was temporarily director of the camp. The family was outdoorsy, with all of them skiing, sailing, and snowmobiling, and all but Constance riding horses. The family took an annual ski trip that Dennis joined when he was working in Toronto. In 1995, Richard and Dennis competed against one another in the Marblehead, Massachusetts, to Halifax sailing race. In a letter to the court in 2016, Constance told the judge that her son “volunteered in the community” as an adult, especially with the YMCA. At age thirty, he was chair of the board of the Maritime division of the Canadian Automobile Association. Constance claimed that he was very active with Enterprise Saint John (a local regional economic development agency that is a cheerleader for the business community) and was set to become its chair “when his marriage came to an end.”62

  The hand of history can sit heavily on any family, but more so with business dynasties. Like his father, Dennis became fascinated with genealogy. His insistence on retaining his grandfather’s house, despite his financial difficulties, may have been motivated by more than a desire to keep up with the Joneses. It was within walking distance of the house on Almon Lane where he had been raised. His parents’s residence had been the home his grandmother Mary grew up in, constructed for her father, Saint John insurance executive Henry Walter Frink, during the First World War. Mary had attended Netherwood School, which began the tradition of private schooling in Rothesay for the Olands. In the 1950s, Dennis’s aunt Jane graduated from Netherwood and Derek and Richard from the boys’ school, Rothesay Collegiate School (RCS). P. W.’s house, where Richard grew up, near the Rothesay Common, was in the heart of the older, exclusive area of the town, and had associations with the Pony Club (to which the Oland children belonged, and the goal of which was to give riding lessons to young people of the community), started by Mary in the 1950s. In subsequent years, the two private schools were merged to create Rothesay Netherwood School (RNS). The principal of RNS is called the “head” and the school has “prefects,” uniforms, and a faux English-public-school tone. These schools market themselves as academically superior to the public schools. Dennis and at least one of his sisters, Lisa, attended RNS or one of its earlier manifestations. Unlike Lisa, who graduated in 1984, Dennis finished Grade 12 at a public high school like his sister Jacqueline. Dennis went to public school, presumably in Rothesay, until Grade 8 when he switched to RNS. In 2016, his mother explained that because of his hearing loss (45 percent since birth) Dennis needed to be in a school with small class sizes. For Grade 11, he was sent to Bishop’s College School in Sherbrooke, Quebec, “where he was a cadet officer and head of a unit,” and participated in sports. As with his father’s temporary exile to Kingston in the 1950s, this appears to have been a decision made by the parents, not the son. As he missed his family, he decided (or was allowed) to return to New Brunswick for his senior year, where he graduated from Saint John High School in 1986.

  Peter Newman in The Canadian Establishment argues that much of Canada’s economic and political elite traditionally have been educated in several dozen private schools, many of them with a snobbish British public school veneer, and that the purpose was not education so much as indoctrination and networking. This system perpetuates interlocking networks of old boys and old girls trained in the basic doctrine that “privilege exists and must be exercised.”63 Yet in Richard Oland’s household, growing up privileged was not without its stresses, largely because of the personality and expectations (not to mention the tight-fistedness) of the patriarch. After his conviction, Dennis told a probation officer that as a child he was “provided with all of life’s necessities” but expected to perform chores; his mother was nurturing and supportive, but his father was “old school.” According to Dennis’s 2016 pre-sentence report, his mother said that Dennis would not communicate with Richard “for weeks at a time.”64

  In 1990, Dennis completed his BA as the University of New Brunswick and then moved to Halifax where he did a term at Dalhousie University. Later, he went to work selling water-treatment systems. In Halifax, he married Lesley Phinney of Truro, Nova Scotia, a graduate of Dalhousie University, in 1995. After this, he moved to Toronto and began working in the mailroom of RBC Dominion Securities, advancing to stockbroker’s assistant. In 2015, he told a court that his father helped him secure the entry-level job. After he returned to Rothesay, he was employed by Richardson Greenshields as an investment advise
r. He purchased his grandfather’s house in the late 1990s. He and his wife separated in 2005 and were divorced in 2006. Dennis later explained to a probation officer that his “wife was tired of being married to someone who was often way from home.” Following the divorce, Lesley worked in real estate and moved to Renforth, an area along the Kennebecasis River that is now part of the town of Rothesay. Her Re/Max site describes her as “a mover and shaker.” Under the terms of the divorce, Dennis was obligated to pay $4,300 a month in alimony and child support. Circa 2009, he began working at CIBC Wood Gundy as an investment adviser. Although the bulk of his father’s investments were handled by experts in Toronto, a portion of Richard’s capital (which increased after he was bought out by his brother) was invested through his son (who at trial downplayed Richard’s investment abilities).

  Either before or after his divorce, Dennis met Lisa (Andrik) Ferguson who also was divorced and had a son. They had two other things in common: Lisa and her friend Mary Beth Watt had purchased a twenty-five-foot C & C sailboat, Loki, before she met Dennis, and she was a member of RKYC (as was Richard Oland). Andrik was the daughter of a Hungarian immigrant who died in Edmundston, New Brunswick, in 2003. That same year, Dennis was the official agent for a local Progressive Conservative (PC) candidate in an election. Lisa has worked as an aide for Saint John Conservative MP Rodney Weston, and in 2010 was campaign manager for provincial PC candidate Dorothy Shephard. According to a friend, Lisa and Dennis were married in a small outdoor ceremony on Dennis’s property in 2009, under the auspices of the Two Rivers Pastoral Charge of the United Church of Canada.