Extracurricular activity included rowing for the Toronto Argonauts (which was also a football team), president of Zeta Psi fraternity and editor of The Varsity newspaper.

[3] Although a fellow U of T student beat his application for a Rhodes scholarship, McQuesten continued his education at Osgoode Hall, also in Toronto.

He began practicing law as a prelude to a planned political career, serving in firms in Toronto, Elk Lake and Hamilton.

Among the many construction projects he spearheaded across Ontario were: Due in part to the start Second World War, Liberal Premier Mitchell Hepburn decided to keep the legislature and its second term government going longer than was popular.

McQuesten participated in this strategy, adding a shifting number of portfolios to highways: mines (1940, 1942–43), municipal affairs (1940–43), and public works again (1942–43).

This suited his technocratic (and sometimes autocratic) nature, allowing him to focus on necessary and useful but rarely politically interesting or rewarding activities.

After his retirement from electoral politics, McQuesten resumed his interest in RBG and became an executive member of that organization, active there until just before he died.

His motivations may have included the fact he had to move himself to attend university and that while there he lost the Rhodes Scholarship to a full-time Toronto resident in what was regarded as a slight against Hamilton.

In addition to the more usual transportation aspects of the job, he used his position to engage in petty rivalry with wartime Prime Minister of Canada and fellow Liberal William Lyon Mackenzie King over an inscription on carillon bells at the Rainbow Bridge (Niagara Falls).

The structure was planned and built in the 1920s and '30s in conjunction with the North-Western Entrance to Hamilton program of the Board of Park Management, when he was most active on it.

After its restoration was complete in 1971, Whitehern has been open as a civic museum and has occasionally served as a period film location.

The formal Thomas Baker McQuesten Memorial is an elevated lookout platform along York Boulevard on RBG's Burlington Heights properties.