iN DISCUSSION: Penticton’s racism bylaw unexplained

This is where cold hard facts give way to the hottest of takes, mostly mine I suppose. I’m the editor, Marshall Jones.

Want to include yours? Listen, this isn’t the comment section, this isn’t social media. Discussion and debate requires context and a wee bit of bravery — we need your name and where you’re writing from. Build it in your account or email me anytime.

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Penticton’s racism bylaw unexplained

Nov. 19 newsletter editorial

We’ve been watching Kamloops and Okanagan cities all confront issues outside of their jurisdiction and how they choose to deal with it. 

It’s a particular interest of ours.

So when Penticton announced that racism is now a bylaw offence worthy of a $500 ticket, we had some questions. 

The city has been battling for years with BC Housing and a growing homeless camp, street issues etc (sounds familiar everywhere) and announced this bylaw in a package of ‘safe space’ bylaws. 

So where did this come from? Is there racism in the camps? to the camps? Is this at all related to the camps?

So I sent Levi Landry to get answers and what we found was so much weirder than anything we might have guessed. 

I would hope that’s not why the City of Penticton and Mayor Julius Bloomfield refused to answer a single question about this for weeks. 

The city issued a press release bragging about this never-before-seen-in-BC-bylaw — a bylaw they spent 18 months making, a bylaw that would launch the Corporation of the City of Penticton into entirely new realms of authority and capacity, trying to regulate free speech and racism with a fine, a bylaw built entirely at the behest of council — and they won’t even talk about it.

So… their bylaw officers will determine what is racism? What is free speech? What is harassment? Will they get training for that? Who is even qualified to train them? How will this be enforced through the courts? Does this open the city to some liability if they fail to enforce their bylaw? 

We’re still reporting this story, trying to get answers to all those questions and more. I’m trying to reserve my conclusions about the merits of such a bylaw which is hard without information, but truthfully, I’m still stuck on the process. 

Am I crazy for thinking this is something a municipal government should explain beyond a news release and canned statement? Or am I just making too much of this? Email me at mjones@infonews.ca.

iN RESPONSE

Good morning!  

I quite enjoy iNFOnews, being relatively new to the area!

The bylaw sounds like a good idea, and amazing they actually responded to a complaint by one person.  

If Calgary already has a bylaw in place, why not ask the police if they’re happy with it? If so, use it instead of re-inventing. And then why bylaw officers, why not the police or would that have to be an RCMP thing?  

Being skeptical here, is this power going to the bylaw officers a clone of ICE agents in the USA?

Good idea, bad outcome??

— Sandy Calder, via email

More behaviour bills for Kamloops mayor

Nov. 17, 2025 newsletter editorial

It’s Kamloops Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson’s fault, right?

I don’t know how else to do the accounting but lay the bill for the city’s former CAO’s severance at Hamer-Jackson’s feet.

STORY: Former Kamloops CAO awarded $412,000 severance

David Trawin said the mayor made his job “unsustainable and untenable,” adding that the mayor “negatively or adversely impacted him on both a professional and personal level.”

That’s why he had to go, he said. That’s why he took more than $400,000 in severance. Toss that bill on a tall pile of the mayor’s behavioural expenses.

Personally, I don’t think that’s the entire story. Reid’s hard to take but I would expect a career bureaucrat being well paid to lead the second largest city in the BC interior to have a little more gumption. 

Councillors and Trawin’s replacement, Byron McCorkell, have figured out how to manage the mayor using all the same tools that were available to Trawin.

Perhaps if Trawin was worth the $300,000 per year salary he took in the easy times, he might have tried saving taxpayers the millions of dollars in legal fees and other costs dealing with the mayor’s conflicts of interest, etc. 

Instead he quit, which is his right. And he can legitimately claim his spoils. He didn’t make Reid Hamer-Jackson hollowly threaten his job more than once. 

Reid knew what he was doing. He wanted Trawin gone and got what he wanted in entirely the wrong way. 

The bill is $400,000. Add it to the pile.

That’s my take, anyway. What’s yours? Email me at mjones@infonews.ca.

iN RESPONSE

I hope the City of Kamloops is able to sue Hamer-Jackson to recover all the losses he created and time wasted while in office. Citizens should not be on the hook for his incompetence, especially for the (hundreds?) of hours he’s taken away from discussing real community issues.

— Karen Klein, via email

I enjoyed your take on the Trawin/Hamer-Jackson issue. As a resident of Kamloops I have seen the chaos that Reid has brought on the city. But the Trawin thing has often gnawed at me. He was the top bureaucrat in the city. You don’t get that job without having some stones. When dealing with a bully, the only viable option is to stand up to them. Trawin turned turtle and disappeared. Not a good look. All the money the taxpayer is on the hook for just makes it worse. I’m no great fan of McCorkell. He’s another overpaid bureaucrat but he is no shrinking violet. Reid won’t be running him out of town.

I don’t always agree with what you have to say but I always find it interesting. Keep up the good work.

— Brian Giles, via email

Penticton spent 18 months writing a unique racism bylaw to target just one person

Anything that can penalize and stop overt racism is a good thing!
A few $500 fines might wake up a person against this type of thing.

— Dianne Courneyeur, via iNFOnews.ca

Former Kamloops CAO awarded $412,000 severance

What has the Kamloops Mayor done except try to make Kamloops better. He has been bullied from the first day by the spend-and-tax gang of 8 council and their sycophants.
Sure he is a rough cut plain spoken mayor but, I don’t believe he has ever lied to the Kamloops citizens like Councillor Sarai lied to the voters. Mr. Hamer-Jackson is not a politician which Kamloops needed to straighten out the “fat cat” administration.

— Garry Davies, via iNFOnews.ca

Thanks to iNFOnews for following up with an FOI as Kamloops city administration and council continue to be the most anti-transparent organization in the city’s history. I doubt we will see this in your competitor’s online paper which is why I always go to iNFOnews for the straight goods. Thanks again for your impartial and professional coverage.

— Robert Mitchell, via iNFOnews.ca

LETTERS

Open letter to Interior Health CEO Silvia Weir and others:

On two occasions in the past three weeks my wife, Janis Thompson, was forced to sleep in hallways at Kelowna General Hospital.

In total, she spent about 144 hours in hospital, about half of that time in hallways.

Janis is 77 and spent 48 hours in the Emergency Department from Oct. 22 to 24. She was initially in an isolation room but when her COVID test came back negative, her bed was moved to the hallway next to the nursing station as she was on oxygen.

There she had to endure the constant noise and traffic not just of the nursing staff but also the other workers squeezing beds and other equipment down the narrow hallway between her bed and closed rooms.

She was hot so was covered only with a hospital gown that contributed to her exposure to the passing traffic whenever she moved, especially when climbing out of bed to shuffle, with the aid of a walker, to the washroom down the hall while trying to hold the gown closed behind her.

Later that evening she was moved around the corner a slight distance from the nursing station so it was a little quieter and a little darker but she needed ear plugs and eye shades just to get a modicum of sleep.

She was not, by far, the only patient in the hallway and, by comparison, had a degree of privacy.

Coming and going to visit her I saw beds lined up “bumper to bumper” in very public hallways with people lying in various states of dress or undress with various levels of pain and distress.

In one of my journeys through the hallways, a large man was loudly cursing, which must have been very unpleasant to those stuck next to him.

In most cases there was no room for visitors to sit in those main public hallways, if they could even find a chair.

I was lucky to get a chair inside the ward so I could sit beside my wife in her bed, as long as we kept our eyes open so I could get up frequently to move my chair for some passing bed or apparatus.

Again, on Nov. 6, 2025, we were back in Emergency.

Again, she was taken into an isolation room but only for about 24 hours.

From there she was moved to a “cubicle” in the Emergency Department. What had once been, maybe, two “rooms” separated by a curtain had been converted into about 6 such “rooms” using folding metal screens between beds.

There was just enough room for the bed and the table for meals with barely space for a small person to squeeze in between – maybe 5 or 6 feet wide. Quite claustrophobic.

Janis’ bed faced the staff “kitchen” which was a counter with a fridge, microwave and ice machine.

That meant, well into the night, whenever Janis managed to fall asleep, there would be frequent crashing of ice into cups and, along with loud talking by staff, sleep was near impossible.

Despite asking for quiet, ear plugs, etc., Janis became so distressed by the cacophony that she actually tried to leave in the middle of her second night.

The next day she was moved to a “relatively” quiet hallway in Centennial Hall with the Emergency Department. There were two other beds, back to back in the same short hallway with a nursing station at the front. It was not an open public area so no through traffic but it was next to doors where housekeepers went back and forth frequently during her time there. It was also next to two elevators. Fortunately only staff used them so the traffic was not heavy.

It was also next to an anxious male patient who kept getting up and walking around, talking intrusively. He was somewhat disorientated and told the nurses his iPad had been flung down the stairs (there were no stairs there). When Janis failed to back his story he got angry, clenched his fists and threatened her. Security had to be called.

Partly due to that confrontation and partly due to an rule that patients could not stay more than 72 hours in Emergency, Janis was transported to ward 5B but, again, only in the hallway outside the nursing station.

She was positioned with only a half screen in such a way that everyone walking into the ward stared straight at her. It was at this time Janis started talking about how undignified all this made her feel.

Again, there was only minimum space for beds and other equipment to squeeze by so there was very little room for me to sit with her. The lights were always on bright with nurses and other staff constantly rushing about.

On this “visit” Janis spent a total of four nights (96 hours) in hospital, with only 24 hours in an actual room with a door on it and more than 30 hours in hallways.

In that 30-bed ward, there were always three or four other patients on beds in the hallways, although some had a bit more privacy.

We were told by one nurse, and it was confirmed by other staff, that there is an unfinished ward that could accommodate 40 more beds but the government refuses to fund its completion.

Some have suggested that there would not be enough staff available to operate it if the beds were installed. But, in a Nov. 8, 2025 interview with iNFOnews.ca, Ms. Weir is cited as saying she has seen substantial hiring success so, I’m sure, staff can be found.

In 2012, the new $218-million Centennial Building was opened to much fanfare as a much-needed addition to Kelowna General Hospital. But very little of it was dedicated to in-patient care.

That expansion increased the number and size of operating rooms, expanded the Emergency Department (so there was more room for beds in hallways?) and other areas but only added 30 beds to the roughly 375 existing prior to the expansion.

Numbers on an Interior Health: Kelowna General Hospital Facility Profile for 2023/24 shows the total number of beds increased to 497 that year from 452 the year before. Of those, 30 were medical/surgical beds and 10 were ICU/CCU/HAU beds.

That’s all well and good and we know that there are huge demands for government funding in many areas.

But having dozens of patients lying on beds in hallways is unacceptable.

Not only is it distressing and humiliating for the patients themselves, but there are major health impacts from possibly contagious patients (the worst cases are isolated but some of those are in fairly open “cubicles” with only curtains sheltering them – curtains that are not washed between patients). The uncleanliness of family and visitors constantly passing by with their own possible contagious coughing is also not good for patient wellbeing.

A Ministry of Health capital budgets page, last updated in June of this year, lists two projects in Kelowna – the rebuild of Cottonwoods Care Home (which, when finished in 2029, should free up a handful of beds in KGH) and new MRI machines, which will do little for in-patient care.

Kelowna, at the last census, was the fastest growing Census Metropolitan Area in the country and has shown little signs of slowing since then. That means a few patients shifted to Cottonwoods in four or five year’s time is not going to have much impact on KGH hallways.

In addition, Kelowna General Hospital is one of two tertiary referral hospitals in the Interior Health Region (the other being Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops with about half as many beds as KGH).

That means patients are sent to Kelowna from as far away as Cranbrook and Williams Lake and KGH has about 1/3 of the 1,560 beds in the entire Interior Health region.

Looking at the equipment and staffing levels on Ward 5B – which we’re thinking is about the same size as the available but undeveloped space – it’s easy to imagine the capital and operating costs of opening up the vacant space.

But, is there not an option between a fully completed ward with a number of private rooms versus beds jammed into public hallways?

Just as the City of Kelowna has worked with BC Housing to set up “tiny homes” as a transition from tents to housing for the homeless, could there not be a half-way model for utilizing available space so patients could retain their dignity while being treated for what, in many cases, are very frightening conditions.

It seems possible, as well, that the available space is designed as an overflow ward that more than 40 beds – 60? 80? – could fit into that space and leave patients with their dignity intact?

Thank you for your attention to this matter and we await your response.

Rob Munro and Janis Thompson, Kelowna

Tara Armstrong Recall Countdown

Tara Armstrong Recall Countdown

Tara Armstrong is currently the MLA for Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream. She rode the coattails of the BC Conservative Party, got elected, then rejected and left the party to serve as an Independent within weeks because the Conservatives were too left wing. Now she gets to spout moronic, hateful rhetoric and claim that her riding supports her.

but not for the first 18 months after an election. Some people started an online petition calling for a byelection once she made a shift to independent, then got herself a raise by forming her own party, but it won’t mean anything until the countdown clock hits zero.

So let the countdown begin!

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