“What was it you were hoping to find in my dialogue?”

Two days after he was publicly accused of breaking the law by not providing records formally requested by iNFOnews.ca, the mayor of Kamloops sent that text to reporter Levi Landry.

A day earlier, a city lawyer asked Landry if he considered his freedom of information request completed because Reid Hamer-Jackson said it was done.

And the day before that, a Kamloops councillor weaponized our records request against the mayor in an open council meeting.

For these and other reasons I’ll explain below, we have no confidence our request to see the mayor’s communications through a set period of time will be fulfilled with any integrity, nor in the process designed to enforce it. We have withdrawn our request before we are drawn further into a news story we still intend to cover and before it turns into a costly debacle for taxpayers in an election year.

Few steps in this process went as expected. The subjects of these requests don’t typically email us records directly and don’t contact us directly. We understand why the mayor wants to know what we “were hoping to find”.

We hoped to find information he doesn’t want us to know. That’s why the legislation exists, why we used it.

This isn’t the first time our records requests were corrupted at city hall and manipulated for political gain. Councillor Bill Sarai somehow knew the day before Landry got the records he would use to expose him for secretly audio-recording a meeting with Hamer-Jackson, then lying about it. Sarai used that time to come clean and spin the story to his favour to another news outlet before Landry even got it.

We were annoyed that our request would be used in an open council meeting in the way it was Tuesday. Councillor Margot Middleton threatened the mayor with more sanctions and punishment if he didn’t comply with the law on our request. We got no notice of her intentions.

“Well, you’re not the star of the show,” Middleton said when asked about this.

Indeed. Nor are we pawns.

Three weeks ago, we had decided to drop the FOI, since it was that or initiate an investigation. City sources privately suggested we keep it going.

We didn’t know why, then. We do now.

But the best reason for dropping the request is that Hamer-Jackson will never release them or follow the law.

When confronted at Tuesday’s council meeting, Hamer-Jackson said he already sent Landry the records. That’s not how the process works but he did indeed send some emails and communications to Landry. They didn’t include what we hoped to find, nor do we consider them in any way complete.

But he did reveal private personal information about his political enemies, most of which were outside the requested date range.

He shared with our reporter a lengthy text message from a former top city bureaucrat detailing their ongoing health issues.

He sent a complaint the city received, including identifying contact information, to Landry, as well as a local blogger, and one of Hamer-Jackson’s friends in the same email chain, after it was first passed to the mayor’s email account. The complaint, from 2023, somewhat ironically decried leaks to reporters about the mayor.

He also chose to send unflattering communications between councillors. One exchange showed them discussing the optics of appearing at a groundbreaking ceremony for the new $211 million performing arts centre while they were privately pondering a 10% tax increase. In another email chain, subject-line “Priemer snubs Kamloops!!!” (sic) from last September, three city councillors discussed drafting a “letter done in capital letters and bold print!!” to Premier David Eby because they were “left off his agenda today” and not invited to a recent Highland Valley Copper news conference.

The only text message that appears to meet what iNFOnews.ca asked for was one in which Hamer-Jackson questioned and berated the city’s code of conduct investigator.

It’s not clear what happens to the deadline council set for Hamer-Jackson to hand over the records now that we have abandoned it.