That's because mongoose.connection isn't the same as the connection that is returned by createConnection().
There are two ways of opening a connection with Mongoose:
// method 1: this sets 'mongoose.connection'
> var client = mongoose.connect('mongodb://localhost/test');
> console.log(client.connection === mongoose.connection)
true
// method 2: this *doesn't* set 'mongoose.connection'
> var connection = mongoose.createConnection('mongodb://localhost/test');
> console.log(client.connection === mongoose.connection)
false
So to solve your problem, you need to connect your event handler to the connection as returned by createConnection(), and not to mongoose.connection:
var db = mongoose.createConnection('mongodb://localhost/cj');
db.once('open', function() { ... });
In short:
.createConnection() returns a Connection instance
.connect() returns the global mongoose instance