Roland Roy McMurtry OC OOnt KC (May 31, 1932 – March 18, 2024) was a Canadian lawyer, judge and politician in Ontario.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[5] McMurtry 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.

He started as the underdog in the campaign, but impressed many delegates through his performance in candidates' debates and polling data showing him as the preferred choice of Ontario voters.

On February 4, 1985, Canadian External Affairs Minister Joe Clark announced that McMurtry had been appointed to succeed Donald Jamieson as Canada's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom.

Upon his return to Canada, he resumed his law practice and served from 1989 to 1990 as chairman and chief executive officer of the Canadian Football League.

That court gained a degree of public attention in 2003 when it ruled in Halpern v. Canada (Attorney General) that provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteeing equality under the law required the Province of Ontario to issue marriage licences to same-sex couples.

His eldest son, Jim McMurtry, ran as a Liberal in British Columbia in the 2006 federal election, placing second to Conservative Russ Hiebert.

A Red Tory, McMurtry expressed dislike towards the Stephen Harper government from 2006 to 2015, claiming it suffered from a lack of compassion, as well as for causing more division in Canadian politics.

[9] McMurtry supported Eric Hoskins in the 2013 Ontario Liberal Party leadership election and Peter Elgie, Green Party of Canada candidate for the York-Simcoe riding in the 2014 Ontario general election and son of Robert Elgie, a Red Tory Progressive Conservative who served as Minister of Labour from 1978 to 1982 and MPP for York East from 1977 to 1985.

[12] In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada "for his distinguished career of public service, notably as chief justice of Ontario, and for his extensive volunteer involvement in many social and multicultural initiatives".