Outspoken Ontario MPP Bill Murdoch to retire

TORONTO – Longtime Ontario Progressive Conservative politician Bill Murdoch announced Monday that he would not seek re-election in 2011.

Murdoch, first elected as the legislative member for Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound in 1990, said he will retire and not run in the next provincial election, scheduled for October 2011.

The outspoken 65-year-old, re-elected four consecutive times, has long marched to the beat of his own drum. Last December, he protested the new harmonized sales tax with a 44-hour filibuster in the provincial legislature. And in March, he suggested that Toronto become its own province to fight against the "Toronto mentality" at Queen’s Park.

Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak said in a statement that the province will lose "one of its most tenacious members, a true maverick and a long-standing champion of rural and agricultural Ontario."