[4] In 1983, Baird Ellan followed her husband Tim into a career as a Crown prosecutor, maintaining a focus in criminal law until 1993, when she was appointed as a judge.
She completed a five-year term as Chief Judge, and returned to preside in North Vancouver Provincial Court from 2005 until her retirement in 2012.
Baird Ellan financed her college and law school education teaching guitar lessons, working as a bank teller, and taking part-time law clerk positions doing research and annotating case books for the BC Supreme Court.
Baird Ellan appeared alone to argue the case while 7 months pregnant with her fifth child, and was successful in achieving an unprecedented unanimous reversal of the Court of Appeal's decision.
A year after the delivery of her fifth child, Baird Ellan was appointed to the Provincial Court by NDP Attorney General Colin Gabelmann, at age 36, as part of a small claims backlog reduction initiative, along with her longtime friends and colleagues, Conni Bagnall and Ellen Burdett, and classmate, the late Chief Judge Hugh Stansfield.
In January 2002, Gordon Campbell's BC Liberal government announced plans to permanently close 24 provincial courthouses to achieve cost savings.
In response, Chief Judge Baird Ellan issued a press release protesting the closures, and wrote privately to then-attorney general Geoff Plant, arguing that the government had made an "unlawful" decision to plan these closures without the consultation of the judiciary, and asserting that Plant had "lost the confidence" of the judiciary.
Under Baird Ellan's direction, the Provincial Court Judiciary prepared an assessment of the impact of the courthouse closures.
[8] The judiciary's resistance to the closures triggered a major public dispute, and the launch of a constitutional challenge of the government decision by the Law Society of British Columbia.
Judge David Ramsay was ultimately convicted of several counts of sexual assault in 2004, and sentenced to seven years' imprisonment.
[14] Baird Ellan has stated that she opposes the Kinder Morgan Pipeline expansion, like then Burnaby-Douglas MP, Kennedy Stewart, now Mayor of Vancouver.