I’d like to welcome the McMurtry family to Queen’s Park, in particular, a good friend of mine, chairman of the Royal Commonwealth Society of Toronto, Andrew McMurtry.

Speaker, if you seek it, you will find unanimous consent to allow members to make statements in remembrance for the late Mr. Roland McMurtry, MPP for Eglinton, with five minutes allotted to His Majesty’s loyal opposition, five minutes allotted to the independent members as a group and five minutes allotted to His Majesty’s government.

First, I want to welcome the many family members and friends of Roy McMurtry to the House today. It’s an honour to speak to you and to members of this House about Roy and his remarkable legacy.

There are many examples that show what kind of a person Roy was. For example, in the 1950s, he started taking legal aid cases when the plan didn’t actually pay any money. In fact, it didn’t pay anything until 1968, which was 18 years later. When Roy became Attorney General, however, he used his position to boost legal aid clinics so that people with limited means would be entitled to legal representation.

Roy ordered bilingualism in the courts, over the reluctance of his own party, creating an extremely important change in access to justice, in their own language, for Franco-Ontarians. As Attorney General, he pushed for tougher sentences for drunk driving, took on racism, made the use of seat belts compulsory, and launched a move to criminalize violence in hockey. We might take the legitimacy of these positions for granted now—that drinking and driving causes terrible harm, that wearing seat belts saves lives, that violence in professional hockey can be deadly and diminishes the game—but addressing these issues met with tremendous resistance at the time.

Roy took a lot of flak for his attempts to call out and reduce the levels of violence in professional hockey, for example. As Jeff Gray wrote, “The hockey world rebelled at his intrusion into on-ice violence.” It’s fair to say that these battles are not over, but I think about what courage it took to speak out against violence in professional hockey at the time, because fights were not only expected, they were encouraged. Many people here will remember that as late as 2004, Don Cherry of CBC’s Coach’s Corner was ridiculing and questioning the masculinity of players who chose to wear visors. That Roy McMurtry was challenging these attitudes and behaviours in the 1970s and 1980s is something that we can look on with respect and admiration.

Roy also pushed to prosecute racial hatred, provoking a response in 1977 from the American Ku Klux Klan accusing him of anti-white activities. He received a letter, which he proudly framed and put in his office.

He mentored people in the law, including racialized women and men, opening doors to people who otherwise faced enormous barriers trying to gain entry as legal professionals into the halls of justice.

Now, I want to point out that these changes didn’t occur in a vacuum. Since the beginnings of Canada, racialized people, Indigenous, Black and brown people have been fighting for justice and equality. Without these movements, the impetus to change the laws would not have been there. But if we think back to the work it took for the initial group of white middle-class women to get the vote, it took men with power and a strong sense of justice to bring about changes in the law, and Roy McMurtry is one of those men who used his power and position to open doors where they had previously been closed.

Importantly, that also included opening doors for people with disabilities, by pushing against his own caucus to include disabilities as a right enshrined in the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1982.

I want to use the little time I have left to talk about why Roy McMurtry has such a place of honour in queer history. It was a long road of movement activism to get here, but in 2003, Roy took the bold step to uphold the legality of same-sex marriage. This ruling has changed so many people’s lives for the better and is still reverberating around the world today.

We can see the effect of this legal ruling in the history of this Legislature, where in the mid-1980s, we had Attorney General Ian Scott, who was not able to be open about his male life partner until after he retired from politics; and Kathleen Wynne in 2003, who was able to win the Liberal leadership and become Premier of the province of Ontario, and she did this with her same-sex partner at her side.

Today’s official NDP opposition has our first-ever queer caucus, with four out and proud MPPs sitting in this Legislature. For this and so many of the reasons I’ve been able to touch on today, we have so much to thank Roy McMurtry for. He was a model politician and jurist who put fairness and inclusiveness at the forefront of his work.

In the words of lawyer and disability activist David Lepofsky: “May we each be a Roy McMurtry to someone else.” May we each be responsible for opening more doors to make our province more humane and inclusive.

I’m honoured to rise today to pay tribute to the late Honourable Roy McMurtry. Mr. McMurtry was a giant in the legal profession, serving as Attorney General, Solicitor General and, of course, Chief Justice of Ontario. As Attorney General, he was instrumental in the creation and expansion of the province’s legal aid system, led the effort to reform family law, and started the process to make Ontario’s legal system bilingual and to translate Ontario’s statutes into French. In addition to being a champion for Franco-Ontarians, he was a steadfast advocate for human rights and he was an ally for the Black community, chairing Ontario’s Cabinet Committee on Race Relations and being steadfast in opening doors and ensuring equality in fighting for the rights and freedoms of all Ontarians, regardless of their background.

Among his many accomplishments, Mr. McMurtry will be most remembered for the late-night kitchen accord with Jean Chrétien and Roy Romanow to broker the deal that achieved the patriation of the Canadian Constitution and the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And I want to be clear: Canadians will be forever grateful for Roy McMurtry’s role in bringing in the Constitution and the charter.

All of us in this House strive to make a difference, but few of us will ever, ever accomplish the achievements that Roy McMurtry accomplished through his courage and his conviction and his passion to public service.

I want to welcome Mr. McMurtry’s family, friends and colleagues to Queen’s Park today. There is no question he was loved and he was cherished by those around him, and I want to thank you for sharing him with us. We’re a better province and we’re a better country because of Roy McMurtry’s service to Canada.

It’s an honour today to rise to pay tribute to Roy McMurtry, member of this Legislature from 1975 to 1985 for the riding of Eglinton. He served as both Attorney General and Solicitor General in the government of Bill Davis.

Serving in this Legislature is only one aspect of a remarkable life and career. He served as High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, chief executive officer of the Canadian Football League, Chief Justice of the Superior Court—I could go on.

I never met Roy McMurtry, but I’ve read a lot in the last few days—which is always a good thing when you get to do these tributes; you get to know somebody. Here’s the sense I got: You knew when he was in a room, and not in an offensive or obtrusive way, and not just because of his size, but because of his manner. He knew how to bring people together to find a solution.

He was there when we repatriated our Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and he played a pivotal role in getting it done. He was able to build Ontario’s justice system by bringing everybody to the table.

I think he understood the hardest part of politics and life is how you use the power and influence and skills to do the things that need to be done, and to have the courage to do the things that people didn’t understand or believe needed to be done, like the work to make Ontario courts bilingual at a time when our provincial neighbour to the east had elected a separatist government. C’était la bonne chose à faire pour assurer aux Franco-Ontariens un accès approprié à la justice.

And in a landmark decision in 2003, essentially legalizing gay marriage in Ontario—many of us can remember how controversial and how difficult that was. That took courage. Here’s what he said about it, and I like this: “I knew the sky would not fall.” He was right. It didn’t fall.

I was talking to my friend and former Premier Kathleen Wynne about Roy McMurtry. She reminded me about something I think is really important. There are so many things. I could be here for the rest of the morning talking about Roy McMurtry, but I’ll try to keep it short. His efforts to educate youth about Ontario’s justice system and the work he did on the roots of youth violence and understanding the supports that young people need—here’s what Kathleen said: “Roy understood how important it was to keep youth out of the criminal justice system that he knew and served so well.”

Roy McMurtry accomplished so many things, but the thing that hit me the most—I don’t know if people read it, but I saw the family obituary in the Star and it said at the top something like, “All his accomplishments are listed elsewhere.” I thought that was a great thing, because the most important accomplishment was there and it was what they wrote. Here’s what the family wrote: “He was a loving family man ... who delighted in the chaos of frequent family gatherings, especially at our beloved cottage.”

I’d like to finish with something that his son Jim wrote. I mean, if we wanted to say one line about Roy McMurtry, maybe we would all want to have our kids say this about us: “My father fought for rights and freedoms; I was the proudest son.” Thank you for sharing your father with us.

I want to thank the members for those eloquent tributes as this morning we’ve come together to give thanks for the life and public service of Roy McMurtry.

Final supplementary?