When 36-year-old Jason McLean took over as chair of the Vancouver Board of Trade on June 17, he was the youngest person ever to be named to that position. He was also likely the only chair of that august organization to be living with his parents.
McLean jokes about his living situation when we meet in his spacious Gastown office overlooking the rail yards and SeaBus terminal. No, he’s not a boomerang kid returning to the parental nest, he explains with a laugh; he and his fiancée are renovating their Point Grey home and decided to camp with Mom and Dad a few blocks away until the dust settles.
It’s been a year of milestones for McLean: in April he was named president and CEO of the family-owned McLean Group of Companies, and he and his girlfriend announced their engagement in June, the same month he stepped into the chair’s office at the board of trade.
If his life trajectory has shifted into overdrive, McLean shows no signs of strain. He appears relaxed and confident as he describes how he came to oversee a sprawling conglomerate with tentacles in real estate, film production and aviation.
The McLean Group began as a side project when Jason McLean’s father, David McLean, a lawyer, began dabbling in real estate off the side of his desk. In 1972 he formed the first of several companies that would eventually fall under the McLean Group banner. Today the family’s most visible holding is the 12-hectare industrial site in East Vancouver that is home to Vancouver Film Studios.
The McLean Group got into film in 1997 when Jason’s younger brother, Sacha, thought there might be a future in renting facilities to film companies. Today the firm is no longer just a landlord; it has built 10 sound stages and developed a suite of businesses servicing the industry, including Blackcomb Aviation LP, which started out ferrying crews to filming locations and today is a full-service air charter and maintenance company.
Sacha was the first of the two McLean siblings to join the family company, stepping in to oversee operations in 1996, after his father was hospitalized with a heart condition. (The health scare proved less serious than feared; today David McLean keeps a hand in the company as chair, while his wife, Brenda McLean, serves as vice-chair.)
At the time, Jason McLean was just entering UBC law school, and a fateful phone call from the prime minister’s office in 2000 would further delay his entry to the family business: Jean Chrétien was looking for someone to do the advance work for his international travels. “So I ran away and joined the circus,” McLean jokes, pointing to a series of framed photographs on the wall of him accompanying Chrétien: waiting to greet Pope John Paul II as the papal helicopter touches down in Toronto, in the still-smoking crater of the World Trade Center in 2001, with Bill Clinton at the former president’s New York office.
McLean returned to Vancouver in 2002, mainly because he could no longer resist the call of the family business, but also because he missed the skiing and mountain climbing. His initial contribution to the firm was as in-house counsel. “Being a lawyer was a great way to stick your nose into every aspect of the business,” he explains, since every contract crossed his desk.
A family-business program at Harvard University prepared him to take the helm, he says, helping him realize that running a business is about more than numbers and finance; it also depends on people and relationships. That said, overseeing complicated business deals remains one of McLean’s key contributions to the business; he takes credit for closing the deal in 2008 that would see the McLean Group become landlord to Vancouver’s first Wal-Mart.
McLean looks back at his days in politics fondly, recalling the thrill of touring the world with a prime minister still at the top of his popularity, in an era of a majority government and budget surpluses. Still, he has no regrets about leaving Ottawa. “I love what I’m doing,” he says simply. A return to politics is not in the cards, he says. “Not at the moment.”
