PALMER: LIBERALS TRY TO SELL LAND SALES

Cash grab: Government has few answers for how $350 million in sales generated any economic activity

When Finance Minister Mike de Jong strode into the legislature press theatre Thursday to defend the government’s record on selling surplus lands, 10 days had elapsed since the New Democrats produced evidence that suggested it had been more like a fire sale.

The long delay in trying to set the record straight underscored how badly the B.C. Liberals had been caught out on the issue, the more so because they had to have seen it coming.

The Opposition launched the charge over the sale of 14 parcels of land in the Burke Mountain neighbourhood of Coquitlam for $85 million, well below the $128-million appraisal commissioned by the government itself.

The Liberals knew the damaging nature of the appraisal because they’d fought a losing battle under access to information legislation to withhold it from the New Democrats, surrendering just days before Opposition MLAs paraded the embarrassing findings through the legislature during question period.

Several days passed before the finance minister took complete charge of the file from the line minister for the sale, Amrik Virk, who knew little about the transaction and demonstrated it repeatedly.

De Jong promised a full accounting that would put the Burke Mountain transaction into the proper perspective with other asset sales. But a full week elapsed before the finance ministry was able to pull together all the details.

That set the stage for Thursday’s press briefing — PowerPoints, spreadsheets, background papers and all. And given the resources that government is able to bring to bear in these matters, the results were a substantial improvement on everything the Liberals had said previously. De Jong was able to show how the government had disposed of about $350 million worth of property over the two most recent budget years (2013-14 and 2014-15) at prices that were in most instances collectively above the assessed values and collectively in the same ballpark as the higher appraisals.

Some gaps remained in the record. And in a preliminary reaction to the overdue release of information the Opposition had been seeking for some time, NDP finance critic Carole James pointed to two dozen instances where property was sold for what looked to be less than optimum values.

Even so, at first review none of the sales departed as dramatically from the appraisals as Burke Mountain — “an outlier,” as de Jong characterized it in fielding questions from reporters after the briefing.

One was left thinking that if the Liberals had provided this kind of briefing on the asset sales before the New Democrats caught them out on Burke Mountain, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.

But that didn’t happen and the lapse is hard to fathom.

Turning land into cash was critical to the Liberal drive to deliver provincial finances into the black and remained so in the months after the election, when the budget remained, as de Jong described it on numerous occasions, “balanced on a razor’s edge.”

Given the critical nature of the effort — and the controversy that attached to it — the government should have delivered a full accounting long ago. Instead, the finance minister was still scrambling to provide details on the sales Thursday.

Colliers International, the agent for many of the land sales, was retained on commission. Payout? De Jong didn’t know. What did the province reap in property purchase taxes on the sales? Good question, de Jong said, but he didn’t know the answer.

Also telling was his response to a question about the title chosen by the Liberals for the surplus land sale, namely Release of Assets for Economic Generation.

Did the ministry have any preliminary estimate of the amount of economic activity that would be generated by the release, to use the preferred euphemism, of so much land into the hands of developers?

Not really, de Jong indicated, adding that the land would surely be more productive in the hands of developers than languishing as vacant lots.

Obviously. But the absence of even a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis left the impression that the bit about releasing assets for economic generation had been little more than a slogan. This was mainly a cash grab, as suggested by a telling email obtained by the New Democrats and released last week, where you had an official in charge of one of the sales admitting: “We don’t have unlimited time. Our goal is to have For Sale signs up by Oct. 31 with sales proceeds in the bank by March 31” — meaning the end of the fiscal year.

Perhaps some of the sales would be rushed. Perhaps some properties could have realized more if left on the market for longer. But with the cash in hand, the Liberals would appear to have lost any further interest in the exercise.

Not until the New Democrats performed the Opposition job of calling the government to account did the finance minister pull together an accounting, such as it was, for the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of public lands.

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In a column Thursday on the budget overruns on several transmission line projects, I should have recorded that the $29-million overrun on the Iskut extension was covered by the builder, Imperial Metals, not BC Hydro ratepayers. My apologies for not reporting it that way.