Politics
In 1815 he turned down a commission into the British regular army, joining the law firm of William Warren Baldwin before starting his own lucrative law firm in Cornwall, Ontario. In 1820, he was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada for Stormont; he held that seat until 1834, shared for the previous four years with his old school friend Philip VanKoughnet. He served as Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, 1831-1834.
He was then elected to represent Cornwall in 1834 and served a second term as Speaker of the Assembly in the 1836 session. He was a leading Tory member and advocated the rights of the Presbyterian Church to be equal to those of the Church of England. Elected for the sixth time in 1836, this time again for Stormont, he soon thereafter is appointed to the Legislative Council and to the King's Bench.
Judicial career
Appointed to the Legislative Council in 1836, the following year he was named to the Court of King's Bench, his brother Alexander McLean taking his Stormont seat. From 1850 to 1856, he served in the Court of Common Pleas with Sir James Buchanan Macaulay and Robert Baldwin Sullivan.
In the Extradition case of John Anderson, the fugitive slave, McLean argued that 'in administering the laws of a British province, I can never feel bound to recognize as law any enactment which can convert into chattels a very large number of the human race.'
In 1862, he was appointed chief justice of the Court of Queen's Bench for Upper Canada. In 1863, he was appointed judge of the Court of Error and Appeal. For many years McLean had served as president of the St Andrew's Society of Toronto.
He married Joan McPherson and they were the parents of seven children. He died in Toronto in 1865 and was honoured with a public funeral. The Upper Canada Law Journal wrote,
Upon the bench was dignified and courteous; unsuspicious and utterly devoid of anything mean or petty in his own character, his conduct to others was always what he expected from them.
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