A report from the Canadian Senate in 2006, on media control in Canada singled out New Brunswick because of the Irving companies' ownership of all English-language daily newspapers in the province, including the Telegraph-Journal.

"[5] The report went further, stating, "the Irvings' corporate interests form an industrial-media complex that dominates the province" to a degree "unique in developed countries."

At the Senate hearing, journalists and academics cited Irving newspapers' lack of critical reporting on the family's influential businesses.

"[7] On December 2, 2015, Poitras published an article about Eilish Cleary's sudden leave from her position as Chief Medical Officer of Health in New Brunswick, noting that Cleary had been studying glyphosate, a herbicide recently labelled as "probably carcinogenic to humans" by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, at the time.

[9] Two days later, J. D. Irving spokesperson Mary Keith released a "sharply worded" statement in response,[10] calling the article a "sensational story" and accusing CBC News of presenting "an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory as fact," further claiming that CBC "falsely implied that J. D. Irving, Limited (JDI) is or was involved in some sort of conspiracy against Dr. Cleary because JDI uses glyphosate".

[11] In their statement, Irving also demanded that CBC "immediately remove the story from their website, publish a full retraction, and apologize for their appalling behavior".

According to Esther Enkin, who reviewed the second complaint, restricting Poitras from writing about the Irvings or using his personal Twitter account "would amount to a form of censorship".