By Mia Rabson

OPPOSITION MLAs yesterday demanded Education Minister Peter Bjornson be disciplined for purposely misleading the House about his knowledge of what they called an illegal land development scheme by Seven Oaks School Division.

Tory house leader Len Derkach rose on a matter of privilege prior to question period yesterday asking Speaker George Hickes to refer the Bjornson matter for review by the committee of legislative affairs. Hickes took the matter under advisement.

"The minister has clearly committed a falsehood," Derkach said. "He knew he was deceiving the House."

Derkach called Bjornson's actions "a very serious transgression" and said it affects the credibility of all members.

Bjornson is under fire for allowing the school division to go ahead with a plan to develop a residential community on almost five hectares of land in Riverbend. The division spent almost $2 million between 2002 and 2005 to develop the land for about 70 residential lots. It bought almost nine hectares, for about $350,000, to build a school but didn't need all of it, and had always planned to develop and sell off the excess.

It sold the lots for $2.7 million.

On Monday, Bjornson claimed he had not known what the division was doing. Then on Tuesday, he admitted he'd been advised about the division's actions in May 2004 but didn't do anything about it at the time. A private citizen sent Bjornson a letter at that time asking if it was acceptable for school divisions to be land developers and providing specific information about what was happening.

According the Public Schools Act, school divisions can't develop land for anything other than a school or education purposes.

Bjornson, however, still continued to claim Wednesday he had not had prior knowledge of what the division was doing.

Derkach said the May 2004 letter proved Bjornson did, in fact, have prior knowledge.

But Bjornson insisted he didn't mislead anyone. He acknowledged seeing the allegations in the letter a year ago, but said he passed it on to the Public Schools Finance Board and was never advised there was any truth to the allegations.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca