osedale Valley Road is a tree-lined sanctuary that winds through the ravined heart of Toronto. For Nigel Wright, it’s part of a half-marathon route he used to traverse virtually every day, but one morning nine years ago its calm was abruptly shattered. Just after five a.m., a German shepherd came charging at him out of the trees. Within moments, three other equally ferocious dogs were also upon him. There was no traffic, nor any apparent avenue of escape. “They started working as a pack,” Wright said in a news account of the incident, “coming around me from all directions. I was extremely aggressive. It was absolute survival and an animalistic response. I really thought that this was it. I absolutely thought I was going to die.” Suddenly and serendipitously, a cab appeared and Wright, who had been kicking frantically at the dogs, managed to flag it down just as their owner emerged from the underbrush and called them off.A “wrong place at the wrong time” kind of event, but the next morning Wright was probably back on the roads. Obsessive about fitness and long inured to the loneliness, the dark, and the vagaries of weather, he runs at a brisk pace — usually twenty kilometres in about 100 minutes. He runs early because that’s when he has time. By seven in the morning, he is at his desk for the start of a second half-marathon, a fourteen-hour day punctuated with work by other names: evening staff meetings, social receptions, and a few armloads of professional reading.
He has been running like this — an average of 120 kilometres a week — for twenty-five years. Until he arrived in Ottawa last fall, he had trained mainly in the neighbourhoods around his downtown Toronto home, although he also runs while travelling on business: the United States, Europe, Africa, Asia, across dozens of alien landscapes. Here’s the basic math: twenty-five years at 120 kilometres per week makes more than 155,000 kilometres. It would be a mistake to regard this statistic as trivial, or to view his running as merely a casual discipline; it’s more than that — a ritual as sacred in some respects as a religious practice.
Indeed, if he were to talk about running, he would doubtless describe its benefits as being as much spiritual as physical — the quest for a Zenlike state in which a stress imposed on the body confers relief of the spirit. At least publicly, however, he isn’t talking about running — nor anything else. In the spring of 2010, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, an old friend, invited Wright to take an eighteen- to twenty-four-month leave from one of the top jobs on Bay Street to become his chief of staff in Ottawa.
It was an invitation that implied no small amount of sacrifice. Wright was a managing director at Onex Corporation, the private equity Goliath and — after the federal government — the country’s largest single employer. Although Onex does not publish details of executive compensation, it is widely believed that his gross annual income in salary and bonuses exceeds $2 million; on Parliament Hill, it’s unlikely that he will earn more than $300,000. Still, Harper’s summons was a call to public service he felt he could not refuse. We live in an age grown properly skeptical of such conceits — noblesse oblige lite — but Wright’s, it happens, is genuine. In many ways, he’s a throwback to another era. He developed an appetite for politics in high school: at seventeen, he wrote a well-reasoned letter to the editor about the flaws in Pierre Trudeau’s constitutional patriation proposal, and it was published in the Globe and Mail. Even then, his preference was more for the meat of public policy than for the seamier side dish of campaign tactics, and it has never really left him.
Nor was his interest simply academic; he sought engagement. In university, he threw himself into the Young Conservatives, backing Brian Mulroney’s leadership campaign in 1983. Greg Lyle, another young Tory at the time, recalls that he found meeting Wright “pretty intimidating. It was incredible how smart he was. He really knew his stuff.” Tom Long, who as president of Ontario’s campus Conservatives led 300 delegates at the convention, recalls that “our bloc ended up being the difference between Brian and John Crosbie on the penultimate ballot. Nigel was a key part of that.” Writer and commentator David Frum, who also met Wright during those years, says, “Nigel was the Conservative’s conservative, but in a very subtle and nuanced way. He saw beyond the Reaganite, Thatcherite slogans of the day. He saw how the Canadian experience was similar and how it was different.”
Still, Wright’s economic instincts — freer trade, lower taxes, less intrusive government — were always identified with the party’s bluer, more libertarian wing.
In Ontario, he led a small cadre of policy planners who worked on Mike Harris’s unsuccessful 1990 campaign, and later played a formative role in the birth of the Reform/Alliance movement. When Tom Long launched his bid for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance Party, he says, “I immediately called Nigel, and he helped me paint a comprehensive picture of how the world works, how domestic policy works; here’s the policy matrix you need to be thinking about. It was like going to school and getting a crash course.” After Long lost to Stockwell Day, he turned once again to Wright, to help raise money to eliminate Long’s campaign debts. (The two have remained close friends; Wright is godfather to Long’s son, Michael.)
Later, Wright was among those who encouraged Stephen Harper to seek the leadership of the newly united federal party. Since that merger in 2003, Wright has continued to play an active — albeit backstage — role, as a productive fundraiser and a valued policy adviser to Harper and other senior Conservative politicians. Even before tapping him to join his staff, Harper was in touch with him on policy questions. Wright used to sit on the board of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, run by former Reform Party leader Preston Manning, an affiliation that gave him a foothold in the two principal factions of the broader party: the more ideologically driven Western element, of which the Manning Centre is at the forefront, and the more pragmatic Eastern group that has effectively seized the levers of party power.
He began work in the Prime Minister’s Office last November, in tandem with outgoing chief of staff Guy Giorno, and became the sole, official gatekeeper on January 1. But the low profile remains; these days, if he consents to any interviews, it will be to trumpet what he perceives as the virtues of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, not to talk about himself. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.) But he continues to run most mornings, and if you rise early enough you may spot him sprinting through the spectral, frozen wastes of the capital. Look closely. As he helps steer the unstable vessel of Harperism toward the next federal election, one eye, at least metaphorically, is cocked for signs of trouble — mindful of both the government’s many political enemies, and those dogs on Rosedale Valley Road that would happily have eaten him for breakfast.
lthough he has spent the past thirteen years at Onex, and about seven before that practising merger and acquisitions and securities law at Davies, Ward, and Beck, one of the country’s most prestigious commercial firms, Nigel Wright’s recent government secondment is not his first direct encounter with Ottawa’s favourite blood sport. In 1984, and barely into his twenties, he took a phone call from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Would he consider taking a hiatus from law school at the University of Toronto to work as a speechwriter and serve as assistant to Charley McMillan, the PM’s senior policy adviser? Wright consulted the school’s dean, Robert Prichard, who urged him to take the job, notwithstanding the inevitable delay and complication of his legal training. But the chat with Prichard was mostly about observing protocol; Wright had already made the decision. As he told his Trinity College friend Kevin Adolphe, “I feel a duty to the country.” From any other bright young college student, this might have sounded pretentious or simply inane; from Wright, it was totally sincere.In Ottawa, he roomed in a downtown apartment with Tom Long, who was working elsewhere in the PMO. “We lived together, but I rarely saw him,” recalls Long. “Nigel worked incredibly hard, late into the evening, and then he’d be up at some ungodly hour working some more.”
One night, Wright and McMillan were staying late in the Langevin Block, across from Parliament Hill, preparing the prime minister’s notes for the next day’s cabinet meeting. It was 8:30 p.m., half an hour before their deadline, when the hotline on McMillan’s desk lit up: it was an aide from Mulroney’s office, asking if the material was ready.
“Almost done,” Wright assured him. Two minutes later, the phone lit up again. Wright impatiently grabbed the receiver and, only half in jest, barked, “Will you fuck off!” Only this time, it wasn’t an aide at the other end; it was Mulroney himself. Unfazed, the PM slipped into his signature basso profundo and crooned, “Could you please put Charley on the line?” And for what was possibly the first and last time in his life, Nigel Wright was left, momentarily at least, cringing with embarrassment.
An old and amusing story, of course, but one that, in the peculiar way the world sometimes turns, acquired a contemporary relevance when Wright, now forty-seven, returned to the Langevin Block last fall.
