Roland Roy McMurtry, (born May 31, 1932) is a Canadian lawyer, retired judge and former politician in Ontario. 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. After leaving politics, McMurtry was High Commissioner of Canada to the United Kingdom between 1985 and 1988. 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. Early life McMurtry was born in Toronto as the son of lawyer Roy McMurtry. 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. He also wrote a weekly column in the Toronto Sun during the early 1970s. Political career In the 1960s, he worked with Dalton Camp and Norman Atkins to remove John Diefenbaker as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. 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. The resulting alliance, known as the Big Blue Machine, dominated the Progressive Conservative Party into the 1980s. Entering the legislature 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 first elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario two years later, in