ROTHENBURGER – Dear media: There’s another side to City council chaos

IF INCUMBENT MAYOR Reid Hamer-Jackson loses on Saturday (Oct. 17, 2026), some local news outlets may as well close their doors. Poor old RHJ has been their bread and butter, their meat and potatoes.

What would they do without Hamer-Jackson to kick around? They’ve spent the last four years fixated on the mayor’s controversies, both in their “news” stories and quite a few opinion pieces.

The media’s disdain for Hamer-Jackson isn’t a secret. Tim Petruk of Castanet once told Hamer-Jackson he was “an idiot.” In a column last week he wrote that Hamer-Jackson “has been the common denominator in every major controversy of the past four years.”

Marshall Jones, who writes for INFOnews.ca, expressed similar sentiments in a piece of his own on the same day as Petruk’s piece. “No one in B.C. needs to lose an election campaign as badly as Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson, and I can’t think of a nicer thing to say about it.”

When CHNL was a bona fide news outlet, and Brett Mineer had a talk show, he declared early on that Hamer-Jackson wasn’t “fit” to be mayor. CFJC news director James Peters acknowledges that Hamer-Jackson “has not received a lot of love” in Peters’ editorials.

God knows Hamer-Jackson has made mistakes. Plenty of them. He’s as stubborn as can be. He’s litigious. He listens carefully to advice, then does what he wants.

He’s sometimes hard to understand because his mind moves faster than he can speak, and his thoughts jump around like a kid in a bouncy castle. Before he finishes one sentence, he’s on to something else.

His term at City Hall has put him in all kinds of financial trouble, he’s been stripped of many of his mayoral duties, and his life is in constant turmoil. And he’s eternally cheerful.

But I don’t need to review the mayor’s trials and tribulations here — all you need do is read any story that Castanet or INFOnews writes about him because even if it’s worth only a paragraph or two they copy and paste a complete history of his legal, financial and Code of Conduct problems onto the bottom of it. In the news game, it’s called boilerplate.

Let’s instead talk about the tired claim that Hamer-Jackson is the only one to blame for the disaster that has been the current council’s term in office. The media have bought into the trope that the mayor is, as Petruk repeated, “the common denominator” of the dumpster fire at City Hall.

“Chaos” is the favourite word when writing anything about this council, mainly in reference to the mayor. It shows up regularly in headlines. “Dysfunction” is another, though the councillors don’t like it. They prefer to say they’re “working through the chaos.”

Indeed, councillors told Municipal Affairs Minister Ravi Kahlon the mayor was “the chief instigator of the ongoing chaos at City Hall.”

And, sure, Hamer-Jackson has certainly been at the centre of this train wreck but let’s look at just a few examples of how things got that way, for the benefit of media who may not have been paying attention.

The St Patrick’s Day Manifesto

This is the one that was written collaboratively in 2023 by councillors online, led largely by Katie Neustaeter. It happened after Hamer-Jackson sent out an email to councillors and senior administrators about changes he wanted to make to committee appointments, increasing public participation and removing some of the councillors as committee chairs.

Before he had a chance to bring it to the next council meeting, it was leaked to local media. Councillors had their shirts in a knot over it, and privately wrote up a speech claiming Hamer-Jackson had crossed “private and professional boundaries,” providing no clue as to what they were talking about.

A state of war was now in place.

Tapegate

Coun. Bill Sarai secretly recorded an argument with Hamer-Jackson in the mayor’s office, in which he made liberal, and frequent, use of the ‘F’ word. After being found out by police, he apologized for lying about it, and got a reprimand and had to take a course for breaching his Oath of Office and the Code of Conduct. His fellow councillors thanked and praised him for apologizing after he was caught.

So many reports

The incident with Sarai triggered what became known as the Honcharuk Report, which concluded Hamer-Jackson had broken Code of Conduct rules with three staff members including then-CAO David Trawin. (Hamer-Jackson, by the way, later said he received in writing an acknowledgement from Trawin that the mayor had not threatened to fire him as had been circulated.)

There followed a whole bunch of reports, including the Chamberlain report, the Graves report, the somewhat mysterious Atwal report, various internal reports, and a number of Harding reports. But the one that cemented the dysfunction was the one delivered by former Abbotsford mayor Henry Braun, who was hired by the Province to look into what wasn’t working at City Hall.

I wrote at the time that Braun, instead of creating a plan to get rid of the conflict, lit a fuse by setting up the council against the mayor. The council immediately demanded that Hamer-Jackson resign (Margot Middleton made the motion.) Even Braun was surprised at that.

Councillors’ version of reconciliation

Demanding the mayor’s resignation, on more than one occasion, was only one example of councillors’ idea of getting past the dysfunction and on to the right track. They also took advantage of the Braun report to cut the mayor’s salary, several times, so that he’s now paid only a fraction of what he’s supposed to get. (After one report recommended Hamer-Jackson face a possible five per cent pay cut, the council doubled it, and added several more demands of its own.)

They removed him as the City’s official spokesperson and started taking turns each month cutting ribbons and making speeches. They took away his office and tried to put him in the City Hall basement. Hamer-Jackson started using the office in his old car lot instead.

Council also took his TNRD directorship away, which further reduced his salary, and also removed him from the airport authority board.

Great way to smooth things over.

The chaos of council meetings

Councillors often talk about the need for civility, but their behaviour at council meetings is often anything but. They make rude remarks to the mayor, talk to each other while the mayor is speaking, and frequently interrupt him. CAO Byron McCorkell and corporate officer Maria Mazzotta often have trouble responding to the mayor in a neutral manner.

Councillors have little understanding of rules of order for the conduct of meetings, making illegal motions at times, recessing or adjourning meetings when they have no authority to do so, and calling “points of order” that aren’t points of order (Nancy Bepple is the most notable for this tactic.)

“Sue me,” Neustaeter recently interjected as Hamer-Jackson was challenging a remark she’d made about police calls to his car lot. Real mature.

Speaking of civility

Councillors have been unable to interact with Hamer-Jackson in a civil manner, and that has caused him to do likewise with them. Their emails and texts are unfailingly marked by shots at each other even when the subject matter is benign.

The relationship has become personal, not professional, to the point almost every notice of motion presented by the mayor doesn’t even get a seconder let alone discussion, including one to eliminate catered meals for council and staff on meeting days, another to do a forensic audit of all City departments and management practices.

When tens of thousands of dollars’ damage was done in a break-in and vandalism at Hamer-Jackson’s auto sales office, the concern of councillors wasn’t for his well-being and the serious damage his property sustained, but whether or not he’d had City documents there.

When Hamer-Jackson’s wife Lori was very ill in hospital, and O’Reilly missed seeing a message that the mayor would be unable to attend a council meeting, O’Reilly as deputy mayor announced that Hamer-Jackson was nowhere to be seen and claimed there was no explanation. Turned out O’Reilly had blocked his texts.

Then there was the remarkable Fartgate incident in which Stephen Karpuk indignantly reported during a council meeting that the mayor had told a rude fart joke at a major public gathering. When the mayor denied it on the spot, Karpuk insisted many others had heard it. The next day, after he was proven wrong, Karpuk went on radio and apologized.

Transparency isn’t so clear

Hamer-Jackson has unstintingly supported transparency at City Hall. He refuses to attend closed-door meetings. He has argued in favour of retaining public inquiries at regular council meetings. (Recently, councillors declined to discuss his proposal that public inquiries be reinstated.) He even started copying his internal emails to local media as a gesture of transparency.

So what has council done? It removed public inquiries from its meetings, cut off comments on the City’s Facebook page, and put stringent rules in place on what people are and aren’t allowed to do as council meeting spectators.

Meanwhile, councillors like to talk about how they’re always available by phone or email, while some residents say they’ve been ignored.

A leaky ship

Hamer-Jackson has been accused multiple times, with reason, for sharing confidential information with the public. They aren’t leaks, though; he does so openly. But true leaks of confidential information have come from elsewhere in City Hall.

His list of committee changes, as already mentioned, was leaked to media after he sent it to councillors and before he intended to raise it at a public meeting. That’s what led to the St. Patrick’s Day Manifesto the very next day.

Confidential emails around the Honcharuk report were leaked to CHNL. The Honcharuk report itself was leaked not once but twice. Parts of it were published in Kamloops This Week.

Another leak accused the mayor of trying to influence where security vehicles were being parked on Victoria Street. (The claim was investigated and found to be unfounded.)

After Hamer-Jackson suspended CAO Byron McCorkell, deputy mayor O’Reilly broke the usual norms of confidentiality by announcing that a meeting would be called to reinstate McCorkell.

A policy being developed on the issue of confidentiality was, you guessed it, leaked.

Chaos on the streets

Hamer-Jackson was elected on the issues of accountability and public safety. Councillors have blocked him at every turn when he’s advocated for an independent audit of the effectiveness of homeless shelters. When he’s tried to get a review of the storage facilities for homeless at 48 West Victoria, council watered it down. Even before the current council took office, when he and former councillor Denis Walsh tried to promote the idea of a full-service drug-addiction recovery facility, Coun. Dale Bass likened it to a “concentration camp.” She refused to apologize. (NOTE: Although Bass was on record as refusing to apologize at first, she says she did apologize later. See Comments section on this story.)

And one more thing

Few of the things done by this controversial council have been more hotly debated than the Alternative Approval Process. The AAP should be used for essential infrastructure. Instead, it was used for the performing arts centre and the arena multiplex. It took away the public’s right to have a full say via referendum. Hamer-Jackson, by the way, tried to cancel the AAP.

And what about councillors’ efforts to connect with the public? Bass has frequently criticized those who disagree with council, and talked about how many people just don’t understand local government.

Sarai once proposed that community groups that oppose the council be banned from receiving grant money.

During a discussion of funding for the performing arts centre, Neustaeter told people to “take their heads out of the sand and out of the weeds.”

Dismissing a report on the Crime Severity Index for the city, Kelly Hall opined, “stats are for losers.”

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A couple of years ago, staff reported to council the obvious, that “Since the start of the current council’s term, council interactions have made national news multiple times, unfortunately for all the wrong reasons.”

No kidding. When the issues of chaos, dysfunction, professionalism and performance arise, it’s been a nine-person activity. Councillors may claim they’ve been “working through the chaos” but, in reality, they’ve done much to contribute to it.

Mel Rothenburger is a former regular contributor to CFJC-TV and CBC radio, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, writes for the Kamloops Chronicle and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and was a Webster Foundation Commentator of the Year finalist. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor.  He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.