John Angus MacLean

J. Angus MacLean (May 15, 1914-February 15, 2000) was a Prince Edward Island politician and farmer. An alumnus of both Mount Allison University and the University of British Columbia with degrees in science, MacLean left farming to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II, serving from 1939-1947 and achieving the rank of Wing Commander.

MacLean's bomber was shot down and he evaded capture in Nazi occupied Europe with the help of the underground resistance. Maclean returned to Prince Edward Island after the war and ran for a seat in the Canadian House of Commons as a Progressive Conservative but was defeated in the 1945 and 1948 federal elections. He was first elected to Parliament in the 1951 election and held his seat continuously until he left federal politics in 1976. MacLean served in the cabinet of Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker as Minister of Fisheries from 1957 until the government's defeat in the 1963 Canadian election.

In 1976, MacLean was persuaded to leave federal politics and take the leadership of the Prince Edward Island Progressive Conservative Party which had languished in opposition for a decade. MacLean led the party to victory in 1979 and formed a government that emphasised rural community life, banned new shopping malls and instituted a Royal Commission to examine land use and sprawl, as well as having cancelled the province's participation in the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station.

At the age of 67, MacLean retired as premier on November 17, 1981 and did not run in the 1982 provincial election preferring to return to the family farm which he redeveloped for low-intensity blueberry farming. A respected steward of the land and of rural communities, MacLean was a committed Presbyterian of Scottish descent. He died in a hospital in Charlottetown on February 15, 2000.