It's no secret that Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson has been including media and a number of others on emails seeking answers to a variety of questions he has. From what I've seen, the Mayor has had about as much success as many residents get when they send an email to citycouncil@kamloops.ca.
The Mayor asked a question
Here's an exchange that left me scratching my head. It was about his 2022 election signs.
Back in August, the Mayor asked Deputy Mayor Bill Sarai to get CAO Byron McCorkell to provide a statement about whether he knew of City staff being instructed to remove some of the Mayor's election signs during the 2022 election.
The question didn't sound that complicated. You'd think the CAO could probably answer whether he knew about it. Sarai forwarded the question to McCorkell.
McCorkell didn't answer. Instead, he forwarded it to the City's lawyer, Denise McCabe. The entire message was: "FYI."
The story got a little more interesting when McCabe replied the next day:
"I think it is important to close this discussion once and for all."
She then drafted the response she thought should go back to the Mayor.
The response essentially said that staff weren't going to revisit the matter and that the Mayor wasn't entitled to require staff to provide statements about these historical allegations. It also said pursuing the request wasn't an appropriate use of staff time or municipal resources.
McCorkell then asked Sarai to send the response "as suggested."
So let's walk through that:
- Mayor asks a question
- Deputy Mayor sends it to CAO.
- CAO sends it to lawyer
- Lawyer decides it's time to close the discussion and writes the response
- CAO sends that to Deputy Mayor
- Deputy Mayor sends it to Mayor
For a question about what the CAO knew.
What the hell are we paying the CAO for?
I'm being a little sarcastic here, but there is a serious question underneath it. The City's 2025 SOFI report says McCorkell received $325,824 in remuneration in 2025.
His job obviously isn't to answer emails all day. But when a question is specifically about what the City's chief administrative officer knew about something that happened inside the City's administration, why does that question need to make a detour through outside legal counsel?
And why does the lawyer decide that the appropriate response is to "close this discussion once and for all" rather than simply have the CAO answer it? That's the part I can't quite get my head around.
There may be a perfectly good explanation. Perhaps there was legal advice being given behind the scenes that isn't in the email chain. The City may already have investigated the matter. McCorkell may simply not have known anything about it. Any of those answers would seem fairly easy to explain.
But that's not what happened. Instead, the question got lawyered, and then it got closed.
Then the Mayor asked again
Then the story gets even stranger.
On September 22, the Mayor brought up his election signs again during a Council meeting and asked McCorkell directly whether there had been an investigation.
I've embedded the meeting video at that point.
Have a listen and make up your own mind about whether the question was actually answered.
You'll have to ignore Councillor Nancy Bepple's repeated interruptions. After 10 years on council, maybe one feels they can ignore the rules, but that's probably a story for another day. It's a little ironic that Council is still telling you that Public Inquiries were removed because the Mayor can't control a meeting properly. But I digress...
What struck me was that McCorkell and the Mayor seemed to be having two different conversations. The Mayor wanted to know whether there had been an investigation into what happened to the signs. McCorkell wanted to know what exactly the Mayor meant by an investigation.
When I said the Mayor has become more patient in my recent candidate profile, this is the kind of thing I was referring to. To me, McCorkell's responses come across as dismissive, and the tone of the exchange certainly doesn't sound like two people trying very hard to get to the bottom of the question. You can watch it yourself and decide whether I'm being unfair. Maybe McCorkell talks to everyone like that.
Eventually, the Mayor moves on to another subject. If you're listening to the video and you're wondering what the Mayor is talking about in regards to pulling the trigger, I've written about Councillor Katie Neustaeter's "trigger-happy" comments in So Sue Me.
Anyways, I'm left thinking about that email from McCabe. "I think it is important to close this discussion once and for all."
Why? Why close it instead of answering it?
And then there's the money
This is where I start wondering about all the talk we've heard about the Mayor causing unnecessary legal costs.
Henry Braun recommended that the Mayor let go of past perceived slights.
The basic argument was that continually revisiting old disputes wasn't helping the City move forward.
Maybe that's true. But wouldn't letting something go be a little easier if you could actually get a straight answer first?
If the answer is "yes", "no", or "I don't know" that would be one thing. But if the answer is essentially "we're not going to talk about it anymore," I can understand why somebody might keep asking.
And if we're going to talk about the cost of the Mayor's ongoing disputes with City administration, shouldn't we also look at what the City itself is spending dealing with those disputes?
I'm not suggesting this one email chain cost taxpayers some enormous amount of money. I don't know what McCabe billed, or how much staff time went into it. But here's the irony.
McCabe's proposed response says pursuing the Mayor's question isn't an appropriate use of "staff time or municipal resources." Fair enough. But how much staff time and how many municipal resources went into deciding that?
So where does that leave us?
Maybe there's nothing unusual here. Maybe this is exactly how a well-run municipality should deal with an old and contentious issue. But if that's the case, I'd like someone to explain it to me.
Because from where I'm sitting, it looks like a fairly simple question took a scenic tour through City Hall before ending up right back where it started.
And I'm left wondering: What's it cost the City to avoid answering a question?
If City officials want the Mayor to stop raising an issue, there's also a legitimate question about whether providing a clear factual answer would be a more efficient way of resolving it.
What do you think?
Editorial disclosure: This article is based on City of Kamloops emails and the September 22, 2026 Council meeting. I've included the relevant correspondence and embedded the meeting video because I think readers should be able to see and hear the evidence for themselves.
Some of the commentary is my own opinion about how the City handled the Mayor's questions. There may be information behind the scenes that I haven't seen, so I'm not claiming this email chain tells the whole story. I'm simply asking whether the way this particular question was handled makes sense — and what it may have cost taxpayers.
If a New Council is elected a financial audit for every city department should be undertaken and a complete efficiency audit should applied to the administration going about 4 deep as there seems to be managers of managers.
It appears the the administration is running the show as it appears the Council in general couldn’t find there way out of a wet paper bag.
Something is very rotten in City Hall!
Why does the mayor spend so much time and effort trying to re-litigate grievances? Whether we’re talking about him squandering his time on the debate stage by answering every question with a historical grievance or requesting in August of 2026 why an election sign was removed in the 2022 election – this is the major problem with this guy. He is blinded and hamstrung by his own grievances. He has accomplished largely nothing in office because of it. To whatever degree he may have ideas worth considering, he cannot get out of his own way. The issue of the election sign was covered by the press long ago. It was a mistake where city workers thought election signs had been placed on a piece of city land where they weren’t permitted, to only find out later, the piece of property was private. The sign went back up. RHJ has been wasting everyone’s time prosecuting this nontrovery ever since. It is no surprise that every request relating to one of his well-known historical grievances would automatically be forwarded to legal counsel. He has a rather well documented history of being litigious. Seriously – move on man.
You write: “What struck me was that McCorkell and the Mayor seemed to be having two different conversations. The Mayor wanted to know whether there had been an investigation into what happened to the signs. McCorkell wanted to know what exactly the Mayor meant by an investigation.”
McCorkell’s confusion arises out of the fact that there was/is nothing to investigate. The matter was quite publicly discussed at the time, and the signs went back up after the city admitted a mistake. RHJ only continues to do this because he’s trying to suggest McCorkell was somehow behind a pretty understandable mix-up by rank-and-file maintenance employees over a property line. WHO EVEN CARES? My god – this was 2022. Why even write about this? What a waste of time.