(Image credit: CFJC)

By Mel Rothenburger

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: Undaunted, the mayor carries on after a very busy week

Dec 10, 2022 | 7:25 AM

IT’S BEEN A BUSY WEEK for Mayor RHJ, and not in a good way.

But in the midst of the chaos, he found an hour for coffee with the Armchair Mayor to talk about it. He was cheerful and talkative; Reid Hamer-Jackson always is. Let’s briefly recap the week’s events.

Tuesday morning, CAO David Trawin told the mayor a closed meeting scheduled for 11 a.m. was going to include a late agenda item that concerned him and it would be best if he weren’t present. Hamer-Jackson attended the first part of the meeting for another issue that took about 15 minutes.

When the item concerning him came up, he left and went to his office and waited. And waited. As he later told one reporter, the situation made him feel “like crap.” Around noon he was feeling peckish so went looking for one of the luncheon wraps brought in to feed council but discovered they were all gone.

Back to his office to wait some more. A few minutes before the regular open meeting at 1:30, council and staff broke from their in camera meeting. Two items on the agenda for the open meeting represented, in the mayor’s view, conflicts of interest for him.

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One was a variance application that involved a friend of the family, and the other was a staff update on actions taken with respect to resolutions from the previous council on social issues and housing.

Due to an exchange in November between his lawyer and a lawyer for ASK Wellness in which he was accused of making defamatory comments, he decided he’d better not sit in on discussion of the staff report.

Anticipating that the report might take a couple of hours (as it turned out, it took only a half hour), the mayor figured he may as well skip the whole thing. So as the meeting got underway, he announced he was recusing himself due to potential conflicts, and left.

(He says the fact he didn’t identify which agenda items he might have a conflict of interest on was simply due to “inexperience.”) Off he went, right out of City Hall and home to watch the livestream of the meeting. He never did get lunch. Later on, he and a couple of friends took a drive up to the Paul Lake area to get away.

As he told me, “out of cellphone range.” All this, of course, drove the media hound dogs into a frenzy trying to figure out what was going on and trying to track him down. Over the next couple of days, Hamer-Jackson made himself available to all the media to explain himself, but the drama wasn’t over.

Trawin called a special council meeting for Thursday afternoon to deal with unfinished business from the earlier meeting. Any in camera meeting must be approved first at an open meeting in which the section of the Community Charter that relates to the subject matter is quoted.

The open meeting began with RHJ in the chair, but only until council voted to approve the closed meeting and to exclude him from it. As explained by City solicitor Denise McCabe, the matter to be discussed at that closed meeting could put the City’s and the mayor’s legal interests at odds. Hence, he shouldn’t be present.

A sidebar to all this is the mayor’s refusal to refer publicly to either ASK Wellness or ASK Wellness CEO Bob Hughes by name. The reason, he insists, is a Nov. 3 letter from a lawyer sent on behalf of Hughes and the agency claiming Hamer-Jackson had defamed them.

While it didn’t identify any specific statements of concern, and stated there was no intention of taking legal action, the letter asked on behalf of Hughes that the mayor stop referring to him publicly by name. I wondered aloud if he was being overly cautious in currently referring to Hughes only as “the individual” since no examples of defamation have been provided and no lawsuit filed.

Hamer-Jackson, however, was adamant he’s “not allowed” to call Hughes by his name. “You should talk to my lawyer,” he advised me. “He knows a lot more about it than I do.” So I did.

The lawyer, David McMillan, suggested the mayor is being “excessively cautious.” At any rate, Friday afternoon, City Hall issued what could be its longest news release ever, attempting to explain the reasoning behind sending the mayor out of the room.

It doesn’t offer much that’s new (though it’s effusive in praise of its own staff) but it makes the interesting statement that Tuesday’s staff report on social issues was requested by the mayor himself. That is at odds with Hamer-Jackson, who says he specifically didn’t want it on the agenda.

This bizarre set of events leaves questions around how the various meetings were handled and whether there might be a new, unrevealed letter from an as-yet unknown party that’s causing all the heartburn around City Hall. The City has offered no clues as to what specific legal issues either of the closed meetings discussed and, due to confidentiality rules, it will stay that way.

So, a few weeks after being sworn in, is Mayor RHJ living the dream? “It’s a great job!” he said, meaning it. I told him he clearly has a lot of support in the community but there are also those who don’t, and who smugly talk about his inexperience and like mentioning his background as a used-car salesman.

“Hater-Jackson,” he said, acknowledging the disparaging play on his name used by some trolls. It doesn’t bother him, though. He doesn’t pay much attention to social media, for one thing. What surprises him most, he said, is the amount of support he’s getting. And he categorically denies a news story this week that he asked City-paid security staff to guard his Victoria Street West car lot.

He said the issue had to do with keeping watch on other nearby businesses and on the CMHA-operated housing across the street. Still, he’s obviously under a lot of pressure. “Do you feel you’re being undermined?” I asked him. “Do you think I am?” he asked me. When I reminded him about the rule on answering a question with a question, he noted that he’s being excluded from meetings and meeting agendas are being drawn up without his input. So, his answer is affirmative.

Nevertheless, he’s optimistic this shall pass. “Once we get through all this,” he mused, he can get on with doing what he was elected to do. “As long as we get some solutions.” Bottom line: he wants to stop people from dying in the streets. “I’m tired of it.”

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops, former TNRD director and a retired newspaper editor. He is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.