THE ADVOCATE 757
VOL. 79 PART 5 SEPTEMBER 2021
stressful situations. And there were lots of those given the profile of the cases
he led: the Federation of Law Societies’ constitutional challenge to the application
of information collection and retention requirements to the legal profession
under anti-money laundering legislation, the Tsilhqot’in Aboriginal
title litigation, the Trans Mountain judicial reviews, the B.C. heavy oil
pipeline reference, the Allard medical marijuana constitutional challenge,
the Braidwood Inquiry, the Missing Women Inquiry, the Money Laundering
Inquiry and many others.
The qualities that Jan brings to the bench were instilled early on by his
father, Rein (who passed away in 2010), and his mother, Lore. As first-
generation immigrants who came to Vancouver after the Second World War
(Rein from the Netherlands and Lore from Germany), they taught Jan and
his sister Carina the importance of empathy and understanding. Rein and
Lore’s pronounced accents and unusual names stood out in their Vancouver
neighbourhood, and from a young age Jan was conscious that his family differed
from those of his neighbours and classmates. Over the years, Jan
spent a lot of time correcting the pronunciation of his first and last names.
For those of you who may appear in front of him, it’s “Br-ong” (like “g-ong”)
“ers” (like “mix-ers”).
Jan graduated from UBC in 1990 with a bachelor of commerce degree
focused on transportation and logistics because of his love for planes, boats,
cars, trucks and trains. The legal community almost lost Jan to the allure of
the railway when the Canadian Pacific Railway offered him a junior management
job with the promise that his training would include instruction on
how to drive a locomotive. Luckily, Jan had already decided, at ten years of
age, that he wanted to be a lawyer. After seeing the courtroom scenes in
Kramer v. Kramer, he rather naively thought, “I could do that.” He was also
inspired to study law by his grandfather (named Jan Brongers as well), who
was a judge in the Netherlands. Jan decided on McGill law school and graduated
in 1994 with a common law LL.B. and a civil law B.C.L. degree. He
summered and articled with Robinson Sheppard Shapiro in Montreal and
was called to the Quebec bar in 1995.
His law school classmates tell me that, unsurprisingly, Jan was a coveted
member of their study group because he was driven, focused, always thoroughly
prepared and extremely generous with his contributions to their collective
learning. But apparently Jan also found time to enjoy the social side
of student life and was a frequent visitor to the student “coffee house”,
where the “coffee” was actually beer served in coffee mugs.
It was at McGill that Jan met his wife, Ellen. Like many young law students,
Jan believed that the foundation of a successful legal career was the