‘I don’t like it when people call Mike cheap’
De Jong’s friendship with Wright typifies another aspect of his personality — he doesn’t take politics personally. When Wright announced in 2013 he would serve as head of the civil service if the NDP won the election, de Jong eschewed the betrayal expressed by many Liberals and penned Wright a congratulatory note.
“He wished me all the best and said you appreciate that I’ll qualify that by saying I hope you realize I’ll do my best over the next three months to make sure you never get that job,” said Wright. He didn’t; the Liberals won the election.
“There is nothing to be achieved and in my view no validity to the assertion that the people sitting opposite you are evil,” said de Jong.
He’s also served as minister of health, aboriginal relations, solicitor general and attorney general.
Along the way, there have been controversies.
De Jong was roundly criticized for letting civil servants cut a deal that had taxpayers pay $6 million in legal bills to former ministerial aides Dave Basi and Bobby Virk, after they pleaded guilty to four charges of breach of trust and accepting benefits in the BC Rail scandal.
It was during his tenure as health minister in 2011-12, that the ministry badly botched the investigation and, later, the firings of eight health researchers in what’s become one of the worst human resource scandals in the government’s history. One researcher committed suicide.
“He was and is hugely accountable,” said NDP critic Adrian Dix. “For whatever reason, he’s managed to evade that responsibility, but the consequences have been felt terribly by others.”
De Jong said that civil servants handled the case, and he didn’t interfere with their investigation.
He’d moved to finance by the time the firings took place. In return for his service as finance minister, the premier has given de Jong free rein as house leader to manage the government’s legislative agenda, and her blessing to ruffle feathers among colleagues by cracking down on bloated MLA expense accounts.
A pet peeve of de Jong’s, he’s pushed MLA expenses into the modern era, despite criticism from members of his own party, foot-dragging by MLAs on both sides of the house and backroom hostility by the Speaker.
He’s forced MLAs to disclose copies of receipts online, and single-handedly torpedoed perks such as meal allowances for family members.
“It’s a pretty straightforward proposition for me that if you are receiving taxpayers’ public money, the public deserves to know details of how it’s spent,” he said. “If you don’t like that, don’t take the money.”
De Jong’s one-man crusade on MLA expenses, though popular with the public, has proven a double-edged sword. When he ran for leadership of the Liberal party in 2011, none of his caucus colleagues endorsed him. One publicly accused him of grandstanding on the expense file. Clark won the leadership. The premier has since made de Jong one of her top advisers, relying heavily on his advice for projects like the $9-billion Site C dam, where she said de Jong impressed her by grinding BC Hydro through a brutal Treasury Board approval process that resulted in Hydro revising its cost estimates.
“I don’t like it when people call Mike cheap,” said Clark. “It’s a cheap word for him. He deserves a much more complex adjective than that.”
“I think I am kind of frugal,” admitted de Jong. “I’m careful with my money. … But it’s also natural for me to be careful with other people’s money.”
His biggest personal expenses have included buying the family farm from his parents, and paying off the mortgage. He helped his parents, now in their 90s, build a home beside his, so they could continue to live on the farm independently.
In his free time, he plays beer league hockey, and occasionally knits (a skill picked up from his mother).
He’s travelled to India several times, picking up some usable Punjabi and most recently completed a 125-kilometre walk to raise health awareness.
At one stop, he met 60 girls at a group home — ranging in age from six months to 16 years old.
Some of them told him they aspired to go to university but didn’t have birth certificates. De Jong asked why, and learned the girls had all been rescued from garbage dumps and gutters, where they were scrounging to survive.
They’d been abandoned by their families, as part of a cultural bias that favoured boys over girls. Nobody wanted them, and none of them even knew their birth dates. De Jong, who’s seldom at a loss for words, went to speak, paused, and then started to cry.
Embarrassed Indian government officials scrambled into action. The girls got their birth certificates.
Unmarried, de Jong prefers not to discuss his relationship status, though he said children “may still happen.”
In the meantime, at least one nephew has expressed interest in moving in with “Uncle Mike” and working the land as the next generation.
De Jong said he intends to run again in 2017 in an Abbotsford West riding that he’s moulded into a Liberal stronghold.
“People ask me why, after 21 years? It’s still fun,” he said.
“It’s particularly fun now. I’ve got the greatest job in the world. I’m lucky.”
He was quite rough around the edges. A farcry from the experienced parliamentarian you see today.
MIKE FARNWORTH NDP MLA, ON MIKE DE JONG’S FIRST TERM AS AN MLA