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By Michael Reeve

REDUCED POOL HOURS

Addressing lifeguard shortage won’t be easy: City of Kamloops

Sep 18, 2025 | 4:26 PM

KAMLOOPS — The Westsyde Pool and Fitness Centre is running with reduced hours due to staffing challenges at City of Kamloops pools. The issue, at its base, is simple — the city needs seven bodies to operate both the Canada Games and Westsyde pools. The are currently just four. Solutions, however, seem harder to find, with council’s Livability and Sustainability Select Committee calling for action on the file.

Similar to a whole host of current challenges, the lifeguard shortage issue in Kamloops can be connected back to the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when pools were shut down.

“Through COVID, what we found was lifeguards weren’t working through the first periods of COVID. Here in Kamloops, we lost the majority of our senior lifeguards who had been with us for a very long time. They moved on to different careers,” said Sherri Holmes, the city’s sport, recreation and wellness manager.

The city has been recruiting constantly for the past two years and has been successful in finding part-time staff, but the challenge is finding full-time, career lifeguards.

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“What we are finding is the majority of people who are applying for our current lifeguarding positions are students,” said Holmes. “Unfortunately, those folks are unavailable during the daytime and this is where we are particularly finding a struggle with our daytime staffing hours.”

Stephen Karpuk chairs the livability committee and questions if recruitment is the right thing to be stressing over, rather than retention.

“We have people who are leaving. We want to know why,” said Karpuk. “And I’m thoughtful of a conversation I had at [the Local Government Leadership Academy] with the mayor of Squamish. His words were, ‘I only ask two questions when we hire people — what will make you stay and what will make you leave?’ And I think we need to know what has made people leave our organization.”

The committee did not make a motion on the issue, but the importance was received by staff, with CAO Byron McCorkell saying it might not be a quick fix.

“Lifeguarding has never been a problem finding people before, ever, and I have been in the business for 30 years,” said McCorkell. “The issue we have now is flexibility in our union contract. We are working with the union on how we might be able to give more flexibility to our staff. We are looking at opportunities for training.”

“I can’t say here in the next week, six weeks, two months, year, we are going to solve it, but we definitely have it on our radar screen. It’s a challenge and it’s not an easy one to resolve in a quick way.”

Staff said there are currently full-time life guard positions with benefits available that no one has been willing to fill for a number of months. It was also noted Kamloops has the second highest wage for lifeguards in British Columbia.