City council in Kamloops is on board with asking the move of documents to be halted out of the local Land Title office.

The city will ask the Land Title and Survey Authority of B.C. to not relocate documents to Victoria from Kamloops until consultations are done with local governments and First Nations.

Councillor Mike O’Reilly brought the motion forward. He says at least a dozen local jobs would be lost, and adds researchers will follow those documents.

“The example that somebody gave to me was if somebody’s studying art, and they said ‘why don’t you just take a picture of the Mona Lisa and just send it to me via email, then I’ll study it.’ Lawyers, land title agents – the private ones – they do heavy research and they need the original documents. That’s why they are in Kamloops,” he says.

“For legal documents that go back to the 1870s, they need the hard copies, they need the way that the documents were actually filed and in what order. Annotations on the back, things that can be missed.”

O’Reilly brought the same motion to Thompson-Nicola Regional District directors last week as well, which was supported unanimously.