While at UPEI, he served two terms as an elected student representative on University Senate. MacLauchlan went on to earn an undergraduate Bachelor of Business Administration degree from the University of Prince Edward Island, followed by a Bachelor of Laws from the University of New Brunswick and a Master of Laws from Yale University. A key formative experience came when MacLauchlan was nominated by his high school teachers to serve as a page in the PEI provincial legislature for two years in 19 at the height of the Comprehensive Development Plan and Alex Campbell's premiership. Along with his studies, MacLauchlan was involved in student politics as vice-president of Student Council and chair of the organizing committee for the annual Winter Carnival. In the summer of 1974, at the age of 19, he headed further afield, working as a guide on cross-Canada bus tours.Īfter completing his first eight years of education, MacLauchlan went from the two-room school at Stanhope to study at Charlottetown Rural High. MacLauchlan worked in many of those ventures with jobs such as weighing and salting fish, collecting garbage, building golf course greens, and carrying suitcases. MacLauchlan's parents went on to other ventures including MacLauchlan's Motel in Charlottetown, expanding the heavy construction business and getting in to cable television, golf courses, oil and gas distribution, and real estate. He would later recall that the only advice offered by his father regarding what was a fairly sizeable business venture for two youngsters was that they should read the newspaper before selling it "In other words, the most important thing in business is to know what you're talking about." By the age of 10, Wade had two newspaper routes along with his cousin, selling The Guardian in the morning and The Evening Patriot in the afternoon. Harry and Marjorie MacLauchlan were businesspeople involved in tourism, fisheries, heavy construction, and several other ventures through the 1960s. The family lived initially in an apartment above a country general store that his father Harry started at Stanhope in 1946 at the age of nineteen. MacLauchlan was born into an entrepreneurial household. The MacLauchlan's were early residents of Stanhope, with a large extended family in Stanhope and numerous other rural PEI communities.
Stanhope is the oldest Scottish community on PEI, with the first Scottish settlers arriving on the ship "Falmouth" in June 1770. MacLauchlan was born on 10 December 1954, the third of five children of Harry and Marjorie MacLauchlan, living in Stanhope, Prince Edward Island. 6 Personal life, Community involvement, Honours and awardsĮarly life, education and career.