Calling Bullshit: O’Reilly and the Flowers

I made a mistake in my last article, Mike O’Reilly Invites Questions. I Have a Few More. I took City of Kamloops Councillor Mike O’Reilly at his word. Although I quoted him accurately, my mistake was accepting his explanation without checking whether it was actually true.

Now that I've checked it, I have even more questions.

Let's start with what O'Reilly actually said

During the discussion that led to his comments about the flowers, O'Reilly was reading and responding to social media comments and questions.

He read out someone's comment:

“Flowers were sent after Mel's article was published.”

and then he responded to it:

“And this was regarding the Mayor's wife being in hospital. And in fact we actually did not send flowers to the hospital as the area that the Mayor's wife was in would not accept flowers. So what we did was once we knew the Mayor and his wife were home we actually sent flowers to the Mayor's home and unfortunately they were returned immediately and sent back and not accepted.”

I called the hospital

Cindy Sonne, a candidate for council, told me she sent flowers to the Mayor's wife while she was in the hospital, and that they were accepted.

That didn't fit what O'Reilly had said, so I called the hospital myself, and had them transfer me to the floor the Mayor's wife had been on. I asked whether I could send flowers to a patient in that area.

The response was an enthusiastic: “Oh yeah.” I was told that I shouldn't send lilies, due to the strong scent, but other flowers were permitted.

So O'Reilly's explanation for why Council didn't send flowers to the hospital doesn't appear to hold up. He didn't say that lilies weren't permitted, or that there were restrictions on certain flowers.

He said the area “would not accept flowers.” The hospital says otherwise. Cindy Sonne says the flowers she sent were accepted.

But O'Reilly was right about one thing

O'Reilly said flowers were sent to the Mayor's home and were “returned immediately and sent back and not accepted.” The Mayor has confirmed that the flowers were indeed not accepted at his home. He took them to City Hall instead.

So O'Reilly was correct about that part, but there's something else about O'Reilly's response that I find interesting.

The original criticism was about when flowers were sent. O'Reilly's response shifted the discussion to whether the Mayor and his wife accepted them.

Those are two different questions. The Mayor's decision to take the flowers to City Hall doesn't change the fact that the hospital told me flowers were permitted in the first place.

Then there's another comment

O'Reilly also responded to another social media comment during the same discussion which he read aloud:

“All right, a Facebook post, and this is regarding the Mayor, and it says: and not one of those hateful eight reached out with well wishes for their co-worker's spouse. They have zero f***ing class.”

O'Reilly responded:

“Well, what I can say is that we actually did reach out and I reached out as deputy mayor. What I didn't do was I didn't make an official announcement in a council meeting as we wanted to respect the Mayor and his family's privacy. And that to me would have been inappropriate, but we did have a private conversation via email.”

That sounds reasonable, but the Mayor has released the email thread to local media. And there's one line in that exchange that caught my attention:

“I am very sorry to hear that Lori is in the hospital.”

I don't want to minimize that. It's an expression of concern and empathy, and I have no reason to believe O'Reilly didn't mean it.

But look at the date. June 17, 2026. That's only a few days before O'Reilly made a very public issue out of the Mayor's absence from a Council meeting.

I wrote about that incident previously in Well Played, Councillor O’Reilly, including the extraordinary step of staff checking the parking lot for the Mayor. Put the two things beside each other and I have a difficult time reconciling them.

On June 17, O'Reilly was expressing sympathy because the Mayor's wife was in hospital. Only days later, the Mayor's absence from a Council meeting became the subject of a very public discussion, including staff checking the parking lot for him.

I can't tell you what was in O'Reilly's mind, but I can tell you what I see in the record. And what I see makes me uncomfortable.

This is where judgment matters

My candidate profiles aren't really about whether I agree with a candidate on every policy. They come down to something more basic: Do I trust this person's judgment?

That's an important question for anyone seeking public office, and even more so for someone seeking the Mayor's chair. O'Reilly is currently a councillor and he's also running against Reid Hamer-Jackson for mayor. So when I look at these incidents, I don't just see disagreements between politicians.

I see questions about judgment, credibility and how an elected official chooses to conduct himself when another elected official — and that person's family — is dealing with a serious personal situation.

Maybe O'Reilly has explanations for all of this. I hope so and I'd like to hear them. Because there are some legitimate questions here:

The Code of Conduct matters too

There's another reason I'm taking this seriously. My previous article about O'Reilly dealt with section 3.11(a) of the City's Council Code of Conduct.

That section requires Council members to ensure communications relating to City, Council or Committee business are accurate and says a member must not issue, or allow to be issued on their behalf, a communication that the member “knows, or ought to have known, is false or misleading.”

I'm not declaring that O'Reilly breached the Code as that's not my decision to make. But we now have another statement from the same councillor that appears to conflict with facts that are relatively easy to verify.

There's also a certain irony in all of this. O'Reilly is the chair of the Thompson Regional Hospital District. I'm not suggesting that position means he should know every Interior Health policy.

But perhaps the chair of the regional hospital district should familiarize himself with the rules about flowers and scents before telling the public that a hospital area won't accept flowers.

There's a bigger question here

The flowers themselves aren't particularly important. What matters is what happens when an elected official gives the public an explanation that doesn't appear to survive a basic fact check.

That's where credibility comes in. As a voter, I have to decide whether I trust the people asking for my vote.

If I can't trust a candidate to give me an accurate explanation about something as simple and readily verifiable as whether a hospital accepts flowers, why would I risk trusting that same candidate to tell me the truth about decisions that will affect me, my family and my neighbours?

Those decisions are considerably more important than flowers. And this isn't the first time I've raised a question about O'Reilly and section 3.11(a).

My previous article dealt with his explanation for why the public lost the ability to submit Code of Conduct complaints. I argued that if O'Reilly couldn't or wouldn't explain why he had attributed the change to an alleged abuse of the system by Denis Walsh, he should resign.

Now we have another statement from the same councillor that appears to conflict with independently verifiable facts. I'm not suggesting that this incident, by itself, proves O'Reilly should resign.

I'm asking voters whether it adds to the reasons they might already have for questioning whether he should remain on Council — or whether he should be asking voters to put him in the Mayor's chair.

So where does that leave me?

I'm not comfortable with Mike O'Reilly sitting in the Mayor's chair. At this point, I'm not even comfortable with him sitting in a councillor's chair. That's my judgment based on what I've seen.

I can't tell voters what conclusion they should reach. But I can show them why I've reached mine.

O'Reilly has an opportunity to explain all of this. If there's information I'm missing, I want to hear it. If I've misunderstood something, I'll correct the record.

But until O'Reilly provides a better explanation, I have to judge what he actually said against what I can independently establish.

The hospital says flowers were allowed. Cindy Sonne says the flowers she sent were accepted. O'Reilly's explanation about why flowers weren't sent to the hospital doesn't fit those facts.

We're talking about a sitting councillor who is asking voters to make him mayor. For me, this comes down to the same question I use when evaluating every candidate:

Do I trust their judgment?

In O'Reilly's case, I don't. And after checking the story for myself, I have no problem saying it plainly:

I'm calling bullshit on O'Reilly's flower story.