Look around Ontario. Unless you cut a big cheque to a hospital or museum, they don’t put your name on a building.
But they did for Roy McMurtry, and it didn’t cost him a dime. The headquarters for Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General, in downtown Toronto, is called the McMurtry-Scott Building, and it’s named after two of the province’s greatest attorneys general: Ian Scott, who had the job from 1985 to 1990 and died in 2006; and McMurtry, who was A.G. from 1975 to 1985 and died last night at age 91. He had been in ill health for years and had a stroke a few days ago.
I suspect that, for the past three decades, most Ontarians would be hard-pressed to know who their attorney general was. That was not the case in the 1970s and ’80s, when McMurtry had the job. In fact, he was in the news so often, on such a vast array of controversial issues, that he was nicknamed “Roy McHeadline” by Queen’s Park journalist Claire Hoy. And the monicker stuck.
McMurtry was very good, but he’d also be the first to tell you he was also very lucky. He went to the University of Toronto and played football with the Varsity Blues at a time when one of his teammates was a fellow named Bill Davis.
Roy McMurtry with Premier Bill Davis (second from left) and Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Tom Wells (immediately to the left of McMurtry) at the constitutional conference in 1981. (Office of the Premier of Ontario Archives)
The close friendship that developed served both men well over the years. Davis’s slim victory in the Ontario Progressive Conservative party leadership in 1971 caused big divisions among Tories. But McMurtry brokered a meeting between Davis and the convention runner-up, Allan Lawrence, and their teams. The result was an instant modus vivendi that allowed the party to quickly unite — it won another majority government later that year.
McMurtry’s first foray into elective politics, however, didn’t go well. Davis’s first term was fraught with problems, and when McMurtry ran in a downtown Toronto byelection in 1973, he lost a “safe” Tory seat to the Liberals. But Davis urged him to try again in the 1975 general election. McMurtry won that one and, over the course of the next 10 years, became arguably Ontario’s most influential attorney general.
From left to right: Roy McMurtry with fellow candidates Larry Grossman and Dennis Timbrell at the 1985 PC leadership convention; McMurtry lasted only one ballot at the convention and supported Larry Grossman on the subsequent ballots. (Steve Paikin)
McMurtry knew he had a special relationship with Davis, and he didn’t hesitate to exploit that. Early in his tenure, he unilaterally — without telling the premier — announced a decision to make Ontario’s court system bilingual.
“That was very unpopular in my party,” McMurtry told me more than a decade ago, in an interview on TVO. “This is where I probably tested the friendship between the premier and I. Because I realized … there wasn’t a hope in hell we’d ever get this through cabinet. [Davis] was not particularly pleased.”
That was a huge understatement. Ontario’s Tory core was in no mood to improve French-language rights, particularly with Quebec electing a separatist government next door.
“But I knew enough about Bill Davis’s essential decency, that he knew it was the right thing to do, albeit premature,” McMurtry added. “And, so, we did it.”
From left to right: Lieutenant-Governor John Black Aird, Roy McMurtry, Premier Bill Davis, and fellow cabinet minister Tom Wells. (Office of the Premier of Ontario Archives)
McMurtry wanted to give Davis plausible deniability on the policy, as if to say, “Don’t look at me. It was my rogue attorney general who did this.” But Davis didn’t fire his AG, and he stuck with the policy, which is still in place today.
The mid-’70s was also a time when goons were ascendant in the National Hockey League. The Philadelphia Flyers — better known as the Broad Street Bullies (named after the street address of their home arena, the Spectrum) — had won back-to-back Stanley Cups by employing a few skill players and an army of ultra-violent goons. On one occasion, when the Flyers came to Maple Leaf Gardens, in Toronto, the on-ice mayhem was so shocking, McMurtry had the police lay charges against some Flyers players. Again, there were allegations (particularly from NHL president Clarence Campbell) that Roy McHeadline was sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. But McMurtry, who played hockey into his 50s, wanted to clean up the sport and didn’t care about the flak. In fact, he took it as a badge of honour that a bar near the Spectrum created a special beverage called “the Attorney General McTurkey.”
Roy McMurtry with Premier Bill Davis at a 1981 Constitutional conference in Ottawa. (Office of the Premier of Ontario Archives)
Perhaps McMurtry’s greatest moment in politics came in the early 1980s, when he was part of a trio of attorneys general who secretly met in a kitchen in the Government Conference Centre in Ottawa to hammer out a compromise that led to the repatriation of the Constitution, with an accompanying Charter of Rights and Freedoms. McMurtry, Saskatchewan’s Roy Romanow, and Jean Chrétien (Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s justice minister) became known as the Three Amigos of the Constitution, and I had the pleasure of interviewing the three of them together in 2012, on the 30th anniversary of that achievement.
When Davis retired in 1984, McMurtry was one of four cabinet ministers trying to replace him as PC party leader and premier. Years later, the Liberal leader of the day, David Peterson, confessed he feared a McMurtry victory the most, since the AG, unlike the other three, had huge name recognition and a lot of personal appeal.
Left to right: Roy McMurtry with Bill Davis at the former premier’s 90th birthday party in July, 2019; the author visiting with McMurtry at his home four years ago. (Steve Paikin)
But McMurtry’s past within the party came back to haunt him. Jealousy of his close relationship to Davis hurt him. So did his penchant for not showing up for caucus meetings and arriving unusually late for cabinet meetings. While the other three candidates — Larry Grossman, Dennis Timbrell, and eventual winner Frank Miller — spent years courting the Tory core, McMurtry didn’t. When he went looking for support for his leadership bid, it just wasn’t there. He came last on the first and only ballot he contested.
But his old friend Brian Mulroney, now prime minister, had a new mission in mind for McMurtry. He appointed him high commissioner to the United Kingdom, where McMurtry crossed swords with British PM Margaret Thatcher, particularly on the issue of ending apartheid in South Africa.
The next chapter of the Mulroney-McMurtry relationship was extremely problematic. Mulroney had thought he and McMurtry had an understanding that, after his term in Britain was over, McMurtry would run as a PC candidate in Toronto in the 1988 federal election. McMurtry insists he never gave the PM that undertaking, and he didn’t run. As a result, for the next two and a half years, the two men didn’t speak.
The author's final visit with Roy McMurtry, on March 7, 2024. (Steve Paikin)
McMurtry practised law and applied to become a judge, but Mulroney blocked his appointment. It took the intervention of the new Ontario premier, Bob Rae, to get Mulroney to change his mind, which he did in 1991. And in classic Mulroney style, he called McMurtry to appoint him to the bench, turned on the Irish charm, and picked up the conversation as if the previous two and a half years hadn’t happened.
Eventually, McMurtry became just one of two men in Ontario history to serve as attorney general and chief justice of the province’s highest court (the other was Dana Porter in the 1940s and ’50s).
One of the most unusual relationships McMurtry had during his career was with the province’s gay community. In February 1981, Toronto police raided four downtown bathhouses, frequented by gay men, and arrested 300 people. For the next many decades, McMurtry frequently had to fend off allegations that he had something to do with those raids. He always maintained he never had.
Roy McMurtry’s name engraved on the walls at Queen’s Park. (Steve Paikin)
In 2003, McMurtry’s reputation with the gay community underwent a massive shift: then chief justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal, he essentially legalized gay marriage in Ontario with a ground-breaking decision, forcing the province to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples.
“I knew the sky would not fall,” he told me in that TVO interview. “I knew that people would, within a very short time, generally accept it as just an evolution of our society. And some, particularly my own age group, are still a little mad at me. But the vast majority of people, I think, are quite indifferent to it.”
During his later years, I was an occasional visitor to McMurtry’s midtown Toronto home, where he loved welcoming me into his “den of memories.” There were innumerable pictures of McMurtry on the walls: with Nelson Mandela, Davis, Mulroney, Thatcher, and so many more. A couple of years ago, he moved into a nearby seniors’ residence, as his health continued to take a turn for the worse. Less than half a year ago, his wife, Ria, died, leaving him quite bereft.
Although his body was giving out, McMurtry’s mind was still incredibly sharp. During one visit, a group of us, many years his junior, tried to remember the name of a lawyer from a well-known case four decades earlier. We couldn’t. But McMurtry could and did. We were astonished.
Agenda segment, November 21, 2015: The Three Amigos
The last time I saw the former chief justice was less than two weeks ago. His declining health was getting him down. But he could still get his dander up over the current Ontario government’s controversial judicial-appointments process, which has been in the news of late. McMurtry vehemently opposed the notion of appointing “like-minded judges,” as Premier Doug Ford calls them.
As it turned out, that was our final conversation.
In that TVO interview back in 2013, I asked McMurtry about his legacy.
“Well, I don’t want to sound self-indulgent or even a little boastful or pompous,” he began. “I’ve tried to leave a trail that has been … non-partisan in my approach to public life and treat everybody the same. I hope I have succeeded to some extent.”
The verdict is in. Roy McMurtry succeeded.
Donate