An MP goes to city hall (KAMLOOPS)

By MARKUS ERMISCH Staff reporterJan 14 2007 http://www.kamloopsthisweek.com/
Expectations are high that a meeting between the local MP and Kamloops council will help mend a relationship that has seemingly spiralled downward since the federal election a year ago.
Both Betty Hinton and city council hope the meeting — the three-term Conservative politician will talk to mayor and council Tuesday — will lead to better, and more regular, communications.
“I think communication is very important, and even though we live in an age of technology I think something gets lost when it’s text messages or answering machines,” Hinton said.
“I much prefer face-to-face. So this is a great opportunity.”

In an unprecedented move, Hinton asked to speak in the delegation portion of Tuesday’s council meeting to allow councillors to ask questions. Hinton said Tuesday may mark the beginning of regular meetings between herself and council, something that hasn’t happened in the past but was common practice while Nelson Riis represented Kamloops in Ottawa as an NDP MP in the 1980s and 1990s. Times to meet are limited to twice a year as Hinton spends her working week in Ottawa.

Although Hinton described her relationship with mayor and council as “very good,” she conceded that, at least in the past year, it could have been better. “We had a new mayor, and he had a lot of things that he had to get straight in his mind, as well as me being new to government,” Hinton said. “I have a lot of new responsibilities. “And probably the opportunity to talk as a council to the MP hasn’t been there as much as it should be. “It’s a brand new year, you make a brand new start and you make communication a little easier.”

Civic lawmakers, however, as well as the city’s two Liberal MLAs, are treated no different than reporters when trying to get in touch with the MP. “We manage the same way I do with the media: they leave a message and I call back right away,” Hinton said. This means none of the local elected officials can reach Hinton directly via cellphone. MLAs Kevin Krueger and Claude Richmond, Mayor Terry Lake and most councillors, for example, are readily available to each other through their cellphones. Hinton is the exception.

Especially in the last year, the relationship between council and the MP has deteriorated, and direct communication has occasionally been replaced by sparring indirectly in the media. “It’s been pretty awful,” Krueger said when asked to describe the relationship between council and Hinton in the past few years. That relationship, Krueger said, had already been rocky under the previous administrations of Mel Rothenburger, but has taken a turn for the worse after Hinton became a member of government after sitting on the opposition benches for her first two terms.

Part of the reason for the deteriorating relationship, according to Krueger, is the lack of tangible results the MP has delivered, particularly federal financial contributions to the expansion of Kamloops Airport and the removal of beetle-kill wood from private land. “If you want to win the next election, you’ve got to deliver results,” Krueger said, noting that “I don’t think [Hinton] has quite changed gears from being opposition to being government.”

Lake, meanwhile, said he hopes Tuesday’s meeting will bring “some clarity” to issues such as beetle-battle funding or allowing people who remove beetle-kill wood from their property to make the expenses income-tax deductible. “I think there have been some hiccups in terms of communication. From our point of view, communication has been sometimes a challenge,” Lake said, noting there is “room for improvement” in the relationship between Hinton and council.
Coun. Arjun Singh agrees.

“I imagine it is pretty obvious to everyone who reads the paper that things ain’t exactly going swimmingly between council as a whole and our MP,” he wrote in his blog. “I believe it might be time for the mayor and the MP to take turns buying a monthly lunch.” Veteran Coun. Pat Wallace also views more regular meetings as beneficial. “It doesn’t happen often enough,” she said, noting that although her personal relationship with Hinton has been “positive,” the relationship between Hinton and council “would have had more direction if we had met a couple of times last year.”