COFFEE WITH THE MAYOR – ‘I’ll just keep working for a safer community’

Several years ago I had a segment on CBC Radio called Coffee with the Armchair Mayor, in which I had conversations with various people on current topics. Given what’s going on in City Hall, I proposed to Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson that we reprise a form of Coffee with the Armchair Mayor but call it Coffee with the Mayor, in which we can talk from time to time about civic issues. Together with a proposal I made to City council at one of its meetings a few weeks ago, to provide columns from council members for local media on a rotating basis, I hope it will help in informing the public on City Hall matters. Earlier this week I talked with the mayor for the first instalment of Coffee with the Mayor. What follows is that conversation, edited for brevity.

– Mel Rothenburger.

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ARMCHAIR MAYOR: First of all, are things settling down at all in your view since the Braun report came out and the meeting that followed, which was quite raucous? What would you say is the mood of City Hall right now?

MAYOR RHJ: Well I think that the councillors and specific administration feel that they’ve just hit the jackpot. It’s pretty obvious that they wanted the Braun report, which is missing a lot of things, like a hundred texts and even … even one of my first conversations with him he said what’s it gonna take to get things on track here, I said for starters a couple of people are gonna have to stand up to the plate and that’s Coun. Neustaeter and David Trawin, I mean David Trawin, I tried to show everybody that he retracted when he said I tried to fire him and I didn’t, and he admitted that I didn’t. You know, Mr. Braun, I gave him the dialogue between myself and CAO Trawin but he didn’t put it in there. There’s quite a bit in there and a lot of things where most people would be filing bullying and harassing cases and that would be me filing against others. So it’s gotten worse, I’m in my office by myself now, you know, it’s crazy what’s going on.

AM: How much contact have you had with councillors since those last couple of meetings?

RHJ: Not much, I’ve gotta go to the deputy mayor for communication with our EA, as everybody can tell when they come into my office I’m the only one there, there’s nobody there, so it hasn’t been great, it’s very hard to communicate through Coun. Hall, you know, ask a lot of questions, try to get things put through to our EA, things to get on my calendar, you know, he tells me that I should manage my own calendar and I should do this and I should do that. I haven’t seen the resolution they put forward or if he’s making decisions on his own but it’s been like that with a lot of councillors ever since the Honcharuk file came out. Things changed with the EA, when the HR director came and I actually found out the HR director took her into the councillors’ office and read out the way things are gonna be. So it hasn’t been good.

AM: So are councillors now directing the EA on what her duties are?

RHJ: Well, yeah, I don’t know who’s directing, but you can see when I go in my office they’ve moved her and there’s something cookin’ there so….

AM: What do you mean they moved her?

RHJ: Well they’ve moved her to a different office out of the area where I am. Like when I bring people into my office it’s very obvious she’s not there, and I have to communicate through the deputy mayor, and it’s not good, it’s, and this shouldn’t be happening, it’s all due to the Honcharuk file, and the Braun file and …

AM: OK, I just wanna be clear, Mr. Mayor, your EA is no longer in the office in which she has sat for many years, or an EA has sat there in that office just outside your office?

RHJ: That’s correct, yeah.

AM: How long has that been going on?

RHJ: It’s been going on for a few weeks now. I’ve gotta get my appointments set up through the deputy mayor and I don’t have anybody if I need anything typed or …. and these measures have been taken with no defence, you know everybody says these things but there’s no proof to any of this stuff and it’s just crazy. I don’t know if anybody noticed but when I asked why everybody was so excited to get this Braun file out which is very, very one-sided, …  in open council meeting I asked the question why are you so excited, or why are you moving so hard when I asked the question why do you want to get this Braun file out so fast, and the Honcharuk file is still sitting there since last year, why aren’t you releasing that, and Coun. O’Reilly piped up and he said, “communications strategy.” Yeah, well I’ve never heard of that. What communications strategy?  So I started thinking about it, is that what’s going on that’s made our city look brutal, that’s made me look like the biggest bully in the world?

AM: Do you have a strategy for dealing with disagreements with councillors and staff right now? In other words what’s your next step or how will you approach this situation, which has gone from bad to worse?

RHJ: Well for starters we need to get these investigations complete, we need to have a look at them, like I said, unless somebody steps up to the plate…

AM: But realistically, what you’re asking for probably isn’t going to happen because the Braun report has been filed, councillors like the Braun report, and they wanna move forward on what he has recommended, not on additional issues which you wanna raise.

RHJ: But why wouldn’t they want the whole report, why wouldn’t they want to have all the dialogue, why wouldn’t they want to have the text messages, because it’s very, very incomplete. Why would they not want to have all that? I don’t know how anyone could possibly think I’m that bad of a person. I’d like to find out what this communication strategy is … I’m just gonna keep working to get a safer community, to get these complex care beds going and more recovery focused buildings, I mean we’ve got 15 harm-reduction buildings, I’m hoping we can start converting some of those into recovery focused buildings, and people who don’t wanna stop doing drugs they can maybe go to the other facilities but again that’s all work and maybe I’ll have to make calls to specific people but it’s probably not gonna get solved in council chambers, I mean, let’s face it, I was looking at the complex care beds and those beds were on the shelf for 18 months and I picked up the phone and called the CEO of Interior Health to find out they’d given five proposals to the City and the City was the holdup, it wasn’t Interior Health and we got complex care beds up and goin’ pretty quick… And hopefully we’ve got another 20 coming. I’ll keep working forward.

AM: Well let’s talk about a couple of other things to do with really the big reason you ran, which is social disorder and all the related issues to that. What’s the status of recriminalization in the city right now, are users of illicit drugs being checked and stopped by police and or CSOs right now since the change was made?

RHJ: I think you’d have to ask Supt. Pelley and our Community and Protective Services Director Uzeloc, because there’s people right down there on my property doing drugs.

AM: Do you think recriminalization in public places will be a change for the better from what was happening with the pilot program on decriminalization?

RHJ: Well I think that we can’t have people doing drugs in our parks, we can’t have it exposed to our kids like this, and our elders, and everybody else. I mean, there’s a harm reduction model and we need it a little bit but we don’t need it to the max that we have. It’s like I called Mike Farnworth the other day and I suggested, because we had a letter we were supposed to be writing to David Eby and Coun. Sarai jumped in and signed it and it was a letter that was supposed to be similar to Hudson’s Hope about the drug issue and I said to him there’s a bit of an opportunity we’ve got in Kamloops. Hudson’s Hope has a thousand people and probably doesn’t have one harm-reduction facility with a safe consumption site. We’ve probably got in Kamloops, I told him, probably 15, so you do need a spot for them to do drugs, so in Kamloops, if we could open already provincially subsidized or provincially supported safe consumption sites, you might have to add some inhalation to them and things like that but every one of these buildings, we’ve got the Interior Health safe consumption down there very close to the park, we’ve got all these facilities, like the Rosethorn, the Emerald, the Mission Manor, Spiro House, the Crossroads, the Maverick, all the shelters, they’re all built, and have safe consumption sites, so if the government were working with the agencies and opened those up to the public, well there’s no reason to be doing drugs in the parks and everything, because you’ve got so many around, so in North Kamloops you’ve got Spiro House there and you’ve got the shelter over here on Kingston Avenue, you’ve got enough places close enough for people to do the drugs so they don’t have to do them in the park. They were built with these safe consumption sites and why not open them up and when they get there maybe start working on trying to get them in a better spot. With these facilities I really believe we could start separating them and people who want to be in a facility and ones who wanna stay in harm reduction…

AM: What effect do you think the Loop having to move will have on the general situation and will the City be able to step in in a timely manner to, I guess, replace what the Loop is doing or at least supplement it if it is able to find another location?

RHJ: Well one thing I know for sure. I’ve been to the Loop many times, I know a lot of the people on the street, a lot of the people who go to the Loop go there to hang out and stuff but a lot of the people that go there live in different agencies, they live in the Rosethorn, or the Emerald or the Mission Manor or the Crossroads, and I think the people at the Crossroads and Out of the Cold do an awesome job but they’re handcuffed and I think that having to kick 30 or 40 people out at 7 or 8 or whatever in the morning is just bizarre, it’s crazy, like I just drove by there this morning, there’s people all around it, we’ve got to start to work to get some of these people home, to get some of these people better, to try to get them into recovery, we’ve got to work harder on that, and again these social agencies, pushing the province is what it’s gonna take, like I said we’ve got ride-home programs but they’re obviously not workin’ very good because, behind my building there were five people there and not one was from Kamloops you know, they’re all from as far as Toronto and St. John and they’re coming from all over and I’m not saying anybody’s busing them in, I’ve never said anybody’s busing them in, but we’ve got to get things straightened out a little bit, they want to go home, so we’ve just gotta keep working on that because you know what, we can keep talking about what we’ve done in council but we have not done the job, we have not stepped up to the plate. When I put a motion forward to ask for 15 outreach workers to be paid for by the province and I can’t get anybody to even put their hand up on that, it’s bizarre and they’re a lot less cost, outreach workers, than a CSO or RCMP or peace officer, you know, and they can go into a lot of situations, not criminal but they can go talk to people. We definitely need more services in these facilities to try to help these people get better.

AM: So, one last question. What can you do next, if you could do just one thing with absolute certainty it would happen, to tackle social disorder, what would that one thing be?

RHJ: Well, I don’t think it would be one thing, Mel, it’s not a one-thing thing. I think, number one, a lot of people really want to go home so that would be one thing I’d want to do. And start working on more recovery focused facilities with more services, those two things right there. Again, we’ve got about 15 harm reduction facilities, I think we could really start focusing. There’s a lot of recovery type people who really want to get going on this.

AM: I’d better let you get back to work. Thanks very much for the time this morning.

RHJ: You betcha, thanks very much Mel.