16 hours Ago By Michael Potestio
Kamloops city councillor Bill Sarai says he is “staying the course," refusing to resign after admitting to he had with Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson and then lying to him about the origin of the tape — prompting the mayor to file over fears his office was bugged. During a special council meeting on Tuesday, Sarai was removed from the deputy mayor rotation and . He was set to serve in that role for December.
Coun. Margot Middleton will fill the role for the month instead. Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Sarai was asked whether he gave any consideration to the recent calls for his resignation, including that has garnered more than 1,200 signatures.
“Not at all,” he said. “I’ve had hundreds of messages and phone calls, and I'm staying the course. I know that I'm doing my job.
It's just turbulent times and I made a mistake, and I'm not enough to own up to it and move on and get the help I need." Asked to respond to those who want him to quit, Sarai said he’s not the person he is being portrayed as by many. He said he is not on the deputy mayor rotation list for 2025 and he is not sure if he will be removed from such duties permanently.
He also confirmed that city council has initiated a third-party code-of-conduct investigation into the incident. Sarai said he will accept whatever measures council imposes. Coun.
Katie Neustaeter told reporters the process of the investigation will be the same as any other alleged breach of council’s code of conduct. “Someone has to file a code of conduct complaint, then that goes to an independent third party investigator who makes recommendations back to council, then council deliberates and imposes whatever measures could take place,” she said. Kamloops city council brought in a policy prohibiting members of council from recording conversations, but it was months after Sarai taped his conversation with the mayor.
Neustaeter said she imagines that is something the investigator will address in their report. Asked who on council filed this code-of-conduct complaint, Neustaeter said she was not sure if she was allowed to comment on that and wished to er on the side of caution. “I believe that’s confidential,” she said.
Sarai said he opted to record the mayor to protect himself from any false accusations that might have been made about the conversation. Two months ago, Sarai sent him an edited clip of the recording. Last week, Sarai told Castanet he decided to send the edited clip to Hamer-Jackson in September after hearing rumours the mayor was painting him as the aggressor.
On Tuesday, Sarai said the decision was “a spur-of-the-moment reply” to a long text message from the mayor blaming him for the highly publicized Honcharuk and Braun reports into the mayor’s conduct. Sarai said the mayor had been telling him since the argument that if he hadn't started yelling and screaming in his office, none of those reports would have happened. “Hearing two years of that, I broke down and made a mistake and sent him a clip of him yelling and screaming and swearing at me, thinking that that would back him off and everything would be fine, and it was a mistake I regret,” Sarai said.
“It was an emotional decision that was still wrong.” Sarai told the mayor someone had “forwarded” him the audio clip of their argument when it was in fact, a recording he made himself. He said he lied to protect himself from retribution by the mayor.
“He’s a very volatile person,” Sarai said of the mayor. Asked if the mayor was right to assume his office was bugged given their conversation was in private and Sarai told the said someone had “forwarded” him the audio, Sarai said he may have “amplified” those fears, but Hamer-Jackson had already been raising concerns people were going into his office and opening his mail. “I should have just told him, 'It's from me,'” Sarai said.
Asked why he didn’t come out publicly about the origin of the recording when it first came to light in October, Sarai said he should have, and wanted to hear the third party review's take on that decision. Under Canadian law, it is legal to record a conversation as long as one of the parties is aware the recording is being made. That person can be the individual doing the recording.
Council’s policy prohibiting members of council from recording conversations came into being when it came to light that he was having over the phone with then-CAO David Trawin in 2023..
