(Please note: The image above is a photo-illustration in which Gordon Campbell campaign signs, circa 2009, have been photoshopped into an image of one of the Little Mountain social housing units that would soon be demolished.)This week The Tyee published a piece by Jen St. Denis that returned to the scene of one of the former BC Liberal government's most egregious crimes - the developer-friendly sweetheart deal that kicked more than two hundred families out of their homes fourteen years ago for
no good reason at all:...In the 15 years since Vancouver-based developer Holborn Group bought the 6.2-hectare site, it’s remained largely empty — a frustration for neighbours, city residents and local politicians in a city known for its housing woes...
{snip}
...For five years, David Chudnovsky, a former NDP MLA, fought to make the sale agreement between the B.C. government and Holborn public through a freedom of information request. When that sales agreement finally came to light in 2021, the province confirmed that Holborn had paid just $35 million of the $334-million sales price.
In 2013, the then-BC Liberal government approved a five-year extension on a $211-million loan given to Holborn, extending the interest-free loan to 2026 — a benefit worth about $9.5 million to the developer based on provincial borrowing costs at the time. The developer also received a low-interest loan for $88 million to complete the social housing...
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And with that, we move on to the history lesson...
As you may (or may not) recall, the pro media-fuelled pitch to we, the people, back in the day was that this deal was going to provide $300 million, plus, to finance
new social housing projects throughout the province.
Which, of course, we now know was total hokum given that the province did not, and still has not yet, received the great bulk of the cash from the sale (/not sale).
But something else was going on around here as 2008 rolled over and became 2009.
Which is that the BC government of the day, led by then premier Gordon Campbell, was putting together a balanced budget in the wake of a global recession in which he and his minions literally made up approximately
$2.5 billion in revenue as they prepared for a re-election campaign later that spring.
After the fact, most of this faux revenue was attributed to bogus tax revenue projections.
However, the pretend revenue from the
'sale-not-sale' of the Little Mountain lands was very likely buried in all that phoney revenue as well.
Why do we come to that conclusion?
Because, a few years later, Christy Clark's then finance minister Michael de Jong quietly removed most of the revenue the government never received from the 2008
'sale-not-sale' in a budget update tabled
in fall of 2012:
...(This) got me thinking of the long con of the original budget bump that occurred with the sale of the land back in 2008.
And the conclusion I came to is that all those families and, as we now know for certain, all British Columbians, were screwed so that the BC Liberals could claim, yet again, that they were running a surplus in the run-up to the last of the GordCo, Inc. election victories the following spring.
My, but that 'Golden Era' sure does have a long tail, eh?...
And the worst, most tragic part of all this political skullduggery from days gone by?
Well...
As Ms. St Denis' story this week made clear, the great majority of even the bare replacement social housing on the Little Mountain site where all those families lost their homes fourteen years ago has
still not been built:...Despite all the taxpayer-funded help, today the site is still an expanse of long grass and wildflowers. A chain-link fence is adorned with Holborn advertising banners that say, “Great Stories Take Time to Write.”...
Sheesh.
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