BC Liberal leadership contender Mike De Jong, made a stop at the Desert Inn on Friday where he scheduled a lunch time stop to meet with potential supporters.
Among the issues De Jong raised during his visit were, the need to rein in spending and keep the deficit down, shrink cabinet from its current number of 24 seats to under 20 and ensure full disclosure of all MLA disclosures.
“I think as elected officials, we owe a duty to the people who pay our salaries and give us the money to operate, to disclose more completely what we do with that money,” said De Jong.
“I have been trying to do this for over a year and I have encountered resistance from both sides of the house.”
“I have made it clear to my colleagues that if they want to serve in a government led by Mike De Jong, that a pre-condition to doing that is disclosing what happens to that public money that they get to operate their offices – that coupled with a pledge to reduce the size a cabinet, has not exactly endeared me to many of my colleagues.”
De Jong hinted at his lack of public endorsements from his Liberal colleagues as a symptom of his willingness to rankle the establishment.
Leadership contenders Kevin Falcon and George Abbott each have 16 MLAs endorsing them with the apparent front runner Christie Clark only having the endorsement of one MLA.
During his meeting De Jong listed his accomplishments as Forestry Minister, citing his ability to open up China, “this newly emerging economic powerhouse,” to BC Lumber.
De Jong conducted his meeting as a round-table discussion and was very quick to open himself up to questions from the gathered BC Liberals, who had far tougher questions for the leadership hopeful than did the various members of the media present.
Fraser-Nicola Liberal riding association president Norm Brigund asked, “today a higher percentage of our health care budget goes to overhead and there is a smaller percent being delivered to people, whereas you have organizations like Interior Health, that are building empires in their overheads.”
De Jong responded by saying, “We are a vastly over-governed society and our response to challenge is generally to create another level of bureaucracy; ironically the consolidation of the authorities was invented to address that.”
De Jong went on to state that what people care about is not who delivers the health-care but that it is publically funded at the end of the day.
De Jong also wanted to re-affirm that he feels the HST is the right tax for B.C. but was sorry for the poorly implemented tax policy that ultimately resulted in the resignation of Premier Gordon Campbell, who was forced to resign due to rising public back-lash against the tax.