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.
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