SINGH – The many joys of serving on city council
Arjun Singh chairs City council meeting in 2017.
By ARJUN SINGH
Kamloops Chronicle
SINCE THE 2022 civic election, Kamloopsians have watched the dysfunction on our city council with understandable concern and anger. Most right-thinking people might look at what is currently happening and close the door on ever becoming a candidate.
Friends, this would be a mistake. The turmoil at city hall is likely an anomaly, a one term phenomenon. Most communities across B.C. that have had huge council conflicts in the past 20 years have had the voters steady the situation in the very next election.
Arjun Singh.
And… if we don’t get a diversity of strong collaborative community builder type candidates here in the October election, voters will have a harder time bringing back stability and collaboration.
I will have no better job than serving on Kamloops City Council. I learnt so much, met amazing people, and had the incredible honour of presenting my fellow citizens in good times and in bad times. While my days on city council are likely behind me, I look back on them with great fondness and gratitude.
Last month, I wrote about the essential characteristics of a good council member — a lot of”need to dos” and “must dos.” Today, let me tell you a few stories about the joys of serving on council:
- Helping people with issues: Citizens naturally look to their city councillors to help them with issues. Often, people can be quite emotional, even angry. To acknowledge emotion, to communicate you will work diligently to assist, if at all possible, and to help address issues successfully. This is a pretty great feeling. Council members can’t address every issue but, and this happens regularly enough, helping people successfully is very satisfying.
- Learning and contributing ideas on a wide range of topics: City councillors are paid to learn about such a diverse range of community activities and then are often tasked to make decisions about them. I derived a lot of joy from being so well informed and was humbled by the opportunity to help make decisions for the whole community.
- Make a positive mark with specific projects: Our current city council will always be the council that finally got a Performing Arts Centre started after many councils failed in the same effort. My dear council colleague Marg Spina started the work to get the junior city council going and asked me to continue for her after she was diagnosed with cancer. I often think of Marg’s legacy and this incredible gift she gave us before she passed away and which will hopefully last long after I am gone from this earth.
- Discovering the huge power of collaboration: In my professional and personal life I make decisions with a relatively small group of people. On council, and on the regional district and with provincial and federal local government associations, I got to witness firsthand the positive power of collaboration with larger groups of people. I had the privilege of learning how to agree well, to disagree well, and to help move important initiatives forward in the best way on a community wide and sometimes every larger forum.
Arjun Singh is a former Kamloops City councillor and is currently the executive director of the Kamloops Local News Society, which publishes the Kamloops Chronicle. This column also appears in the January edition of the Chronicle. He can be contacted at info@kamloopschronicle.com.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
Arjun Singh’s categorization of individuals as “right-thinking people” appears divisive and lacks a clear definition of the criteria used for such a label. This phrasing risks dismissing the legitimate frustrations of residents who are concerned about the current state of our community.
The characterization of recent local governance issues as an “anomaly” avoids addressing the root causes of the situation. Given Mr. Singh’s extensive tenure of over 13 years on the council and his role as a former mayoral candidate, a more comprehensive insider perspective on the historical context of these challenges would be valuable. Instead, his focus remains on anecdotal successes rather than substantive analysis.
Furthermore, there appears to be a lack of critical discussion regarding the absence of thorough consultation and cost-benefit analyses on key projects. Many of the escalating street-level issues, including vandalism, theft, and public disorder, can be traced back to long-term decisions made during his time in office. Glossing over these realities does a disservice to the businesses and citizens who are dealing with the resulting economic and social costs.
Effective community discourse requires addressing these broader realities directly rather than controlling the narrative to avoid accountability.
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I don’t see the point of these Arjun articles. Mostly truisms or a potential puff piece for a future run. I understand Arjun is a positive person, and we need those, but we also need unvarnished criticism of the obvious problems facing not only this town, but BC and the country.
I think a more valuable opinion piece would have only one sentence: “NO INCUMBENTS 2026”. If you want a tagline, it could be “anything is better than this”.
To those who dislike the Mayor, would you be up for a pact where the Mayor supporters abstain from voting for him if you abstain from voting for incumbent councillors?
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Is there any sense of sour grapes with Arjun that he lost the Mayoralty bid to a newcomer to politics?
I’d like to know also if he feels the situation to be “functional” is to have 8 people run for council as individuals and then have numerous citizens recognize them as the “gang of eight” not long after they were sworn into office? Most citizens would think that people who ran individually for office would remain more or less as individuals while they were in office. Instead, the gang mentality took over and the voting followed that mentality.
If Mr. Singh feels that the “dysfunction” can be blamed on one person, maybe he should have been more direct and had the courage to say so. My feeling is that Reid Hamer-Jackson did not receive the gift of a soapbox from Santa this past Christmas.
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It is kind of ironic that this op-piece talks about moving society forward as if improvements are consistently being made when the evidence, the undeniable empirical (and statistical) evidence before our eyes, points in a direction that is frightening opposite. Going along to get along shifts us sideways at best, likely backwards truly.
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A quick thank you to Mr. Pierre for consistent counterpoints to the frequent propaganda/propaganda lite/PR spin that is most of local media and local voices.
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