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In nailing down these details, Culbert (and Postmedia News’s Dan Fumano who worked with her on the most recent instalment of the Little Mountain story) faced an uphill struggle. The Liberals kept the deal shrouded in secrecy from the outset. Holborn, an international firm owned by one of Malaysia’s richest families, resisted disclosure as well.

But some details have come to light through Access to Information filings by David Chudnovsky, a former NDP MLA for one of the Vancouver ridings, who lives near the Little Mountain site.

Given the Liberal fingerprints all over these deals, one might have expected the NDP government to expedite Culbert’s request for information about the other transactions in the Liberals’ ambitious sale of surplus lands. She asked if there were other unpaid balances in the estimated $1-billion-worth of sales. As of Saturday’s story she had yet to get an answer because the Finance Ministry doesn’t compile a deal-by-deal breakdown of individual land sales.

Citizens Services Minister Jinny Sims is the NDP cabinet member who inherited the surplus-land-sales program from the Liberals. She says the government has reined in many of the Liberal excesses, guided by a cautionary report last year from Auditor-General Carol Bellringer.

“We actually iced the sales and put a hold on them, except the ones that had already gone past the point of no return,” she told Culbert earlier this year.

At the A-G’s urging, the New Democrats are making a greater effort to identify possible future uses of surplus properties as sites for schools, hospitals, daycares, social housing and other public facilities. The New Democrats have also put renewed emphasis on the need to accommodate Indigenous people for land sales within the First Nations’ traditional territories. The Liberals did some of that as well, putting aside about 10 per cent of the proceeds from surplus sales to compensate First Nations.