Roy McMurtry

Roland Roy McMurtry, (born May 31, 1932) is a Canadian lawyer, retired judge and former politician in Ontario.

He was educated at St. Andrew's College and graduated in 1950.

He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto (Trinity College) in 1954, and a Bachelor of Laws degree from Osgoode Hall Law School in 1958.

While attending university, he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity and became a close friend of future Premier of Ontario Bill Davis, his Canadian football teammate.

While studying, he was hired to teach football at Upper Canada College.

He also taught adult literacy classes at Frontier College, working through the day on construction projects and teaching at night.

He was a trial lawyer for seventeen years before entering politics.

In the 1960s, he worked with Dalton Camp and Norman Atkins to remove John Diefenbaker as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.

He also wrote a weekly column in the Toronto Sun during the early 1970s.

McMurtry suffered a back injury during the 1971 Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership convention and was able to exempt himself from choosing between Davis and rival candidate Allan Lawrence, whose campaign was managed by Atkins.

Davis defeated Lawrence by 44 votes on the final ballot.

A few weeks later, McMurtry organized a meeting which brought together the Davis and Lawrence leadership teams.

Allan Lawrence resigned his St. George constituency in late 1972 to move to federal politics, and McMurtry was recruited by Davis as the Progressive Conservative candidate for a March 1973 by-election.

He was unexpectedly defeated by Liberal Party candidate Margaret Campbell, a well-known municipal politician.

He was a Progressive Conservative member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1975 to 1985, serving in the cabinet of Bill Davis as Attorney General and as Solicitor General.

He was first elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario two years later, in the 1975 provincial election, defeating Liberal candidate Frank Judge in the Eglinton constituency.

Davis won a minority government in the 1975 election, and McMurtry was immediately appointed to cabinet as Attorney General.

In 1978, he took the first steps to make Ontario's legal system bilingual and to start the process of translating Ontario's statutes into French.

He was a major advocate for human rights and improved race relations.

McMurtry was also the provincial minister responsible for emergency planning.

During the 1979 Mississauga train derailment, he largely deferred to Mayor Hazel McCallion, who was the public face of the crisis handling.

McMurtry was a Red Tory, and he was one of Davis's closest advisers in government.

As Attorney-General, he had been a primary negotiator for Ontario in the Trudeau era constitutional negotiations.

He appeared as counsel for Ontario in the Patriation Reference before the Supreme Court of Canada.

The resulting alliance, known as the Big Blue Machine, dominated the Progressive Conservative Party into the 1980s.

In November 1981, he played a major role in brokering the deal that achieved patriation of the Canadian Constitution and the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

A late night "kitchen accord" between McMurtry, Jean Chrétien and Roy Romanow on 6 November 1981 broke a deadlock in negotiations, and resulted in the governments of all provinces except Quebec agreeing to the proposed reforms to the Constitution, which came into law the following year.

One of McMurtry's lowest points was his role in the prosecution of nurse Susan Nelles, who was charged with the murder of a number of infants at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

The charges were dropped following a preliminary hearing and Nelles was exonerated by the Grange Commission, a royal commission called upon to examine the deaths.

McMurtry was criticized for his Ministry's role in her wrongful prosecution.

He was also Attorney-General at the time of the 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids which were widely denounced as one of the most socially regressive acts in the province's history.

At the time it was widely believed that the raids were approved by McMurtry.

After leaving politics, McMurtry was High Commissioner of Canada to the United Kingdom between 1985 and 1988.

He held this position until 1985, and he also served as Solicitor General from 1978 to 1982.

McMurtry introduced a large number of law reform bills and was largely responsible for family law reform in Ontario.

He became a judge in 1991 and was appointed as Chief Justice of Ontario in 1996.

McMurtry retired from the bench in 2007 and returned to the private practice of law.

McMurtry was born in Toronto as the son of lawyer Roy McMurtry.

In a 2007 interview, McMurtry, looking back at the incident, said "I can remember that I had been away with my family on a school break, when I came back and saw the headlines, I brought in my deputy attorney-general, and said: 'What the hell is going on here? You've had a nurse arrested at one of the world's most famous hospitals?' " McMurtry said that local prosecutors failed to consult the ministry before consenting to the charges and that examining the case McMurtry had doubts that Nelles had exclusive access to all of the children.

In a 2007 interview, however, McMurtry said that this was not the case.