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Kamloops Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson may not be complying with the attorney general after all, but he has a few more weeks to decide for sure.
The mayor said he was meeting with a lawyer from B.C.'s Ministry of Attorney General this week to go over a package of documents regarding the province’s demand he return a confidential workplace report he distributed to reporters last year.
The report, which was mysteriously dropped in the mayor's mailbox last April, includes details of a 2023 investigation into allegations of Hamer-Jackson bullying staff members, and contains personal information about city staff.
The ministry filed a petition in B.C. Supreme Court on Jan. 30 seeking an order requiring Hamer-Jackson to return or destroy any copies of the report in his possession, and to name anyone who received a copy from him.
While he initially indicated he would give back the report, Hamer-Jackson now feels he may pull back because the City of Kamloops asked the province to intervene and retrieve the report last year as opposed to the directive coming straight from the attorney general.
“I’m probably going to be fighting this attorney general's thing,” Hamer-Jackson told Castanet Kamloops on Thursday.
“I told them I would be handing it over, unless I've seen something unusual in the package, and I have. I've seen the reason why this is happening is because the city administration has sparked it.”
Hamer-Jackson said he’s been given 21 days from the time the petition was filed to hand over the report. If he doesn’t, he said, he will fight the order in court and file his own affidavit.
The mayor said he feels if he turns in the report now he may never find out who initially leaked the document in 2023. He said he does not feel the city tried hard enough to unmask the original leaker, despite a $63,000 code of conduct investigation that looked into it dating back to the month of the original breach.
The report, completed by Terry Honcharuk of the Integrity Group, was first obtained independently by Kamloops This Week in August of 2023.
Before he found it in his mail box eight months later, Hamer-Jackson had been demanding to see the report, which he was not privy to because he was considered to be in a conflict of interest, according to the ministry's petition.
“Even if the mayor was entitled to possess the report, which he is not, he still could not use or disseminate it without offending the Community Charter,” the document reads.
AG says it's a last resort
Attorney General Niki Sharma said the province has stepped in previously to enforce privacy laws, but she said taking the mayor to court is a last-resort option.
“Every organization that collects private information is under our privacy laws and they have an obligation to protect that information,” she said.
“If they have gotten to a point where they’ve exhausted all avenues and are unable to do that, it has happened before where they’d ask the attorney general’s office to step in, so the ministry filed that [petition] in court to make sure privacy laws are upheld.”
Asked why that action wasn’t taken in 2023 when the report was leaked initially, Sharma said she wouldn’t speak to specific facts before the court, but the normal course of action would be for the city to exhaust all avenues first before getting the AG involved.
Sharma said she heard the mayor was considering handing over the document.
“I have heard of that and we are obviously watching to see of the privacy breach is rectified and whether court action is needed,” Sharma said.
The Honcharuk report found the mayor behaved inappropriately on a number of occasions in interactions with then-CAO David Trawin, then-protective services director Byron McCorkell and another staff member.
City council, in response, restricted his communication with those individuals, requiring a third party to be present — rules the mayor is still bound by and that he says has made his job difficult to do.
The mayor claims the allegations detailed in the report are lies, but he refused to be interviewed by Honcharuk in 2023.
