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Cariboo Local Affairs · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Casey: Hey there. On today's episode: Eby's promised ten-cent fuel tax relief, a Pacific Link pipeline suddenly designated a project of national interest, and the Greens wanting a moratorium on AI data centres. Plus our Deep Dive: three Cariboo seats are decided before anyone votes, so is a small place with one name on the paper well served? Stay with us.
• 0:33
  Casey: Welcome to Cariboo Signals, an AI-generated review of the latest tech news and ideas that impact our rural communities. I'm Casey. It's Saturday, October 3rd, 2026. Today's theme is Cariboo Local Affairs. Reaching you from the heart of the Cariboo, the homeland of the Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in, and Dakelh nations.
• 0:52
  Riley: And I'm Riley. Two weeks to the local vote, three weeks to the provincial one, so today is about who is on the paper and what they have done.
• 1:01
  Riley: Out at Horsefly Lake it's overcast and around 6 this morning, with a high of 17, a low of 4 and no precipitation. Quesnel and 100 Mile House are both around 5, Williams Lake is around 6, and Tatla Lake is around 4.
• 1:16
  Casey: Dry day, then. Good one to stay in with the news.
• 1:20
  Riley: A lot of this morning's news sits inside the provincial campaign, with the pump, the pipeline and the data centre all in the argument.
• 1:29
  Riley: B.C. NDP Leader David Eby is promising temporary fuel tax relief and new price controls aimed at lowering pump prices if the NDP is re-elected. My Cariboo Now carried it Friday. The party's figures put the relief at 10 cents a litre on gasoline and diesel. Which retailers the price caps would cover is not in the reporting we've seen. For a region where nobody drives less than forty kilometres to anything, the pump price is a kitchen-table number.
• 1:56
  Casey: Price caps have a long record of being easier to announce than to enforce.
• 2:02
  Casey: Also from My Cariboo Now, Prime Minister Mark Carney has designated the proposed Pacific Link pipeline from Alberta to B.C. as a project of national interest. That is a federal designation landing in the middle of a provincial campaign. The headline gives us the designation and nothing about route, timelines or who has been consulted along the way. Whose territory a line crosses, and who was at the table, are the questions that matter for any pipeline, and the story as published doesn't answer them.
• 2:32
  Riley: The B.C. Greens are proposing a moratorium on AI data centres and greater oversight of them. Emily Lowan is quoted saying AI safety rules should be in place first. The piece ran in the Williams Lake Tribune on Friday, written by a Sooke News Mirror reporter. Data centres are a live question for a province with cheap hydro and cold weather, and rural land is where operators tend to go looking.
• 2:58
  Casey: The NDP is calling on the Conservatives to fire their North Island candidate over 2022 vaccine claims. The candidate is a physician. The Tribune piece we have is from Thursday, and it carries no response from the Conservatives.
• 3:13
  Riley: This one is U.S. policy, not ours to vote on, but it may set a precedent. After one of the largest wildfires in Colorado history hit Rio Blanco County in 2025, rancher Deirdre Macnab, as Mother Jones tells it, saw cows burned to death and pigs lost to smoke. The magazine ties that to a Supreme Court case that would try to make Exxon and Suncor pay for climate damage. Suncor is a Canadian company, so the Canadian oil patch is named in a U.S. courtroom.
• 3:41
  Casey: Ranchers in the Cariboo who lived through 2017 will read that one closely.
• 3:48
  Casey: The Atlantic has a review of Douglas Smith's book The City Without Jews, about Vienna's loss of its Jewish community through expulsion and extermination. One line from the excerpt stays with you. Viennese intellectuals call it a Kahlschlag, a clean blow, a forestry term for when an entire forest disappears in one stroke. The book's argument is about what a city loses when it betrays part of its own population. It is a long read, and a heavy one.
• 4:15
  Riley: Amazon says it is no longer using non-disclosure agreements for its data centres. WIRED reports the company has stopped using secret agreements with county officials. It also acknowledged that community backlash is leading to data centre moratoriums across the United States. Think about who sat across the table in those county offices: a small staff, a few elected people, and a company with a legal department the size of a town.
• 4:42
  Casey: Which is the Greens' proposal, arriving from the other direction.
• 4:47
  Riley: The Pentagon's watchdog is warning that elite Navy special warfare boat crews may be returning to duty with undiagnosed brain injuries. The report says sending service members back into high-risk environments that way could hurt operations.
• 5:04
  Casey: Popular Mechanics has a piece on research suggesting powerful people's brains experience an altered state of reality. Psychologist Shonna Waters is quoted saying people in positions of power show reduced activity in the mirror neuron systems, the circuitry for empathy and perspective-taking. It is a research summary, so take the sweep of it carefully.
• 5:25
  Riley: A weekly injection, a rival to Ozempic, delivered 25 percent weight loss at its highest dose in a Phase 3 trial, according to ScienceAlert. Phase 3 results are the last stage before regulators review a drug, so this is a result and not yet a prescription.
• 5:43
  Casey: California man Yiu Kong Lui is accused of smuggling 300 million dollars' worth of Nvidia chips to China. Prosecutors say he conspired with foreign shipping companies to trick U.S. manufacturers into selling him the chips.
• 5:57
  Riley: If you do CNC woodworking and your cuts keep tearing out the grain, there is a video from Kagi's small web feed with a theory on why chip-out happens and worked examples of fixes.
• 6:10
  Casey: The AI-driven component crisis has reached TVs. TechRadar reports that for some models, the processors now cost more than the display panels. Memory and even Wi-Fi module prices are rocketing.
• 6:23
  Riley: Last this morning, a forester's story from Canadian Forest Industries. Jordon Gabriel earned a Diploma of Technology in Renewable Resources, Basic Forestry, and a Forest Resource Technician Certificate at BCIT. The building where BCIT delivered that program is the office where he has worked for his Nation since 2011. That is more than thirty years in the industry, twenty of them with BC Wildfire. The excerpt we have doesn't name the Nation. What it does say is that he is passionate about restoring cultural knowledge in forest management, and the piece is titled "Managing for everything."
• 6:59
  Casey: After the clean-cut image from Vienna, that is a very different idea of what a forest, or a place, is for.
• 7:06
  Riley: Forestry that sets out to manage for everything ends up asking who is allowed to decide, and that leads into the Deep Dive. First, a community spotlight.
• 7:16
  Casey: Salvation Army Williams Lake runs a food bank, an emergency shelter, free meals and a Christmas hamper program for families across the community. With Thanksgiving coming up, they are a good place to send a donation of food. They give free meals and hampers to people who walk through the door, and the need doesn't take a holiday.
• 7:35
  Riley: Local, practical and open all year. If you've got a cupboard of cans, that's a good home for them.
• 7:42
  Casey: Now to the ballot. Two weeks from the local vote, and three from the provincial one.
• 7:47
  Casey: Three seats in this region are settled before anyone votes. Area D and Area F of the Cariboo Regional District went by acclamation, and in the School District 27 trustee seat for Zone 6 the only name is Michael Franklin. Is a small place with one name on the paper well served, or just short of people willing to run?
• 8:05
  Riley: Both, and the evidence for which one is thin. Start with what's filed. Mayor of Williams Lake: Surinderpal Rathor, who holds the seat, and Walt Cobb. Fourteen names for council. Area E has two. Zone 6 has one.
• 8:18
  Casey: Fourteen names for council and one for a school board seat. Pick your size.
• 8:22
  Riley: Fourteen answers your question. In 2022 Williams Lake had four serious people for mayor. Small hasn't stopped people from running for the top job.
• 8:32
  Casey: Running isn't doing the job well. Four candidates tells you the seat was attractive. It doesn't tell you the city had the staff to deliver what the mayor promised.
• 8:42
  Riley: Staff capacity shows up in results, and voters here have thrown out incumbents. Per the Tribune's live blog, Cobb beat Rathor in 2018, 1,843 votes to 1,177, which is 60.4 percent. Four years later Cobb was the sitting mayor and finished third. Rathor won with 34.1 percent per CFJC's preliminary count, ahead of councillor Jason Ryll at 28.1 and Cobb at 24.2. The Tribune's preliminary numbers had Rathor at 1,091, Ryll at 898, Cobb at 773. A town that size can punish a mayor.
• 9:17
  Casey: In a town where everyone knows the mayor's cousin, yes. That works when the candidates are known. It doesn't tell you what the incumbent did with the term.
• 9:26
  Riley: So what did the term do?
• 9:27
  Casey: Not in today's sources. My Cariboo Now has carried Rathor's second-term pitch to keep the momentum, but we can't say what that momentum was, which budgets passed, which votes he cast. His own Facebook page says he sat on council for seven terms from 1993 to 2014, and that is self-described. The city's staff directory says he was elected mayor in 2022.
• 9:49
  Riley: Cobb's side is easier to document.
• 9:51
  Casey: All of it. FPAC says he was a councillor from 1980 to 1990 and mayor from 1990 to 1996. Wikipedia has him as the BC Liberal MLA for Cariboo South from 2001 to 2005. The CBC said in 2021 he had been mayor since 2014 and was re-elected in 2018. Then he lost in 2022, third place. And on November 1st, 2021, Chief Willie Sellars called on him to resign.
• 10:19
  Riley: Over a Facebook post.
• 10:20
  Casey: One that claimed there were positive aspects of residential schools and that young Indigenous people "just want to be victims." Cobb told the Tribune he shared a forwarded post and said "we need to look at every side of everything." The post was deleted. A call to resign is not a finding, and what council did about it isn't in today's sources. But it's part of the record.
• 10:41
  Riley: Voters had that record in 2022. They had the 2021 post when they placed him third.
• 10:48
  Casey: The 2022 result is the freshest one we have for him, and it was a loss. Whatever the 1990s say, his most recent run ended third.
• 10:57
  Riley: That cuts both ways. A comeback bid means the city has a recent, high-stakes record to judge. That's the small-town advantage.
• 11:04
  Casey: The filed list closes part of the gap on the lower races. It doesn't close the one that matters: for most of these people we have a name and a year.
• 11:13
  Riley: Take council. Sheila Boehm, a chiropractor, two terms as an SD27 trustee before council, per the Tribune. Michael Moses, first elected in 2022 with support from Indigenous leadership per the Tribune, described in the city directory as Secwépemc and Nlaka'pamux and a board member with the Canadian Mental Health Association Cariboo Chilcotin.
• 11:35
  Casey: Scott Nelson.
• 11:36
  Riley: The city directory says about twenty years on council, three of them as mayor.
• 11:41
  Casey: And in June 2025 a B.C. Supreme Court petition was filed against him, his wife Twila Smigelsky and their companies. Dr. Mark Lambiotte Inc., Dr. J.D. Neufeld Inc. and members of the Lambiotte family allege breach of fiduciary duty, forged signatures and misappropriated funds, with as much as 15 million dollars in refinancing and sale proceeds unaccounted for. None of it has been proven in court. His lawyer, Patrick Sullivan, calls the claims fundamentally wrong and a dispute between business partners. A consent order in early August 2025 restrained the couple from moving assets of the named companies. Where the case stands now isn't in today's sources.
• 12:20
  Riley: Allegations, denied, unproven, and the latest thing we know is a restraint order on assets. Voters can hold that and twenty years of service in the same hand.
• 12:30
  Casey: They can. But a small-town council is who would look into its own member's business dealings. There is no integrity commissioner on staff to refer it to. Whether small means accountable depends on someone outside the room doing the looking.
• 12:44
  Riley: And the person who first reported the Nelson story is on the ballot herself.
• 12:48
  Casey: Ruth Lloyd. A former Tribune journalist, listed by the Tribune as a newcomer, and the author of the August 2025 piece on the lawsuit. The Tribune ran letters supporting her around the turn of the year after a city councillor questioned one of her articles in a social-media video. The councillor wasn't named in what we've seen, and no source ties that video to the Nelson story.
• 13:11
  Riley: So the one person who covered local government is now asking to sit at the table. Small town.
• 13:17
  Casey: Which is the problem. When the local paper's reporter becomes a candidate, a thin press corps gets thinner.
• 13:23
  Riley: Or someone who has watched council from the press bench knows what the job is. Jason Ryll finished second for mayor in 2022 after serving on council, and the Tribune this September calls him a former councillor, so he apparently didn't return to council in 2022. Paul French served before 2022 and is a past president of the Chamber of Commerce, per the Tribune in April. Whitney Spearing is a first-time candidate, and professional profiles describe her as WLFN's director of natural resources and an archaeologist. Rafiullah Sahibzada appeared before council on June 16th with members of the Central Cariboo Islamic Center about safety concerns, per Today in BC. Billie Sheridan was reported by the Tribune in June as an openly transgender woman who could be Williams Lake's first openly trans councillor.
• 14:16
  Casey: And Hays, Jeannotte, O'Connor, Wiebe, Zaruk.
• 14:18
  Riley: Their records are not in today's sources, so we can't say more about them.
• 14:22
  Casey: Jared Wardlaw-Gimbel withdrew, so he isn't running.
• 14:26
  Riley: A big field of newcomers is a signal. The pipeline of people willing to serve is open. You don't get that in a captured system.
• 14:34
  Casey: A crowd of names we can't tell apart is also what a ballot looks like before the campaign starts. Newcomers don't have a vote record. A voter is picking on a Tribune paragraph.
• 14:44
  Riley: Forums fix that. Record them and post them.
• 14:46
  Casey: And hope people watch.
• 14:48
  Riley: Now the regional district. Area E is contested. Melynda Neufeld has been director since 2022 and board vice-chair since November 2023, per the Tribune. Mary Forbes is running against her. No platform for either is in today's sources.
• 15:05
  Casey: Area D's Steve Forseth was acclaimed, per the Tribune on September 15th. Area F's Maureen LeBourdais too. Voters in those areas get no ballot for that seat. None. A Fox Mountain resident has nothing to mark for their regional director.
• 15:18
  Riley: Acclamation can mean satisfaction. If nobody wants to challenge the director, maybe the director is doing the job.
• 15:25
  Casey: Or no one wants a job with that workload. Both stories have the same headline. I'd need to know how many people considered running and passed, and that's invisible from outside.
• 15:36
  Riley: We don't have evidence either way. Forseth was NCLGA first vice-president and later president, per the Tribune, so he's visible beyond the Cariboo. LeBourdais is a long-time Beaver Valley resident, per a Tribune profile. Neither one's voting record is in today's sources.
• 15:52
  Casey: No contest, no scrutiny. An acclaimed director has no reason to explain what the board did with a budget, and no one is asking.
• 15:59
  Riley: The Tribune is.
• 16:00
  Casey: With a thin newsroom covering the whole region.
• 16:03
  Riley: Ha. Fair enough on the count.
• 16:05
  Casey: The trustee seat is the same. The Tribune says Michael Franklin is the current board member seeking re-election, and no one stands against him. His vote record and first-elected year are not in today's sources.
• 16:18
  Riley: Small is also why one person can know every principal in the zone. A trustee can take a call from a parent on a Sunday. A bigger district can't do that.
• 16:27
  Casey: And a bigger district has a communications office and an audit function. A trustee who takes every call and has no staff to turn a complaint into policy is an approachable bottleneck.
• 16:38
  Riley: Approachable beats distant.
• 16:40
  Casey: Sometimes. Not if the problem sits in a file nobody has time to open.
• 16:44
  Riley: On the provincial ballot, small and big collide. Lorne Doerkson has been MLA for Cariboo-Chilcotin since 2020, first elected as a B.C. Liberal, re-elected in 2024 as a Conservative. He is now interim Conservative leader, per CBC and the Globe and Mail on September 26th. He promised to double liquefied natural gas production by 2032, per My Cariboo Now. Kathryn Askew of Canim Lake is the NDP candidate, a retired teacher with 32 years in education, past local president and bargaining chair for the teachers' union and a volunteer with the Hawkins Lake fire department, the Forest Grove Legion and the Canim Lake Community Club, per the Tribune on October 1st.
• 17:27
  Casey: The sitting MLA is running a province-wide campaign while defending his own seat. A small riding with a party leader as its member either gets a national microphone or an absent candidate.
• 17:38
  Riley: Leaders show up in their own ridings. They need the margin. Doerkson won in 2024 by 7,722 votes, 13,714 to 5,992.
• 17:49
  Casey: That margin was as a rank-and-file Conservative. Interim leader is a different job.
• 17:54
  Riley: In Prince George-North Cariboo, which includes Quesnel, Sheldon Clare won in 2024 for the Conservatives. He suspended a leadership bid in February, per CFJC. He's on the ballot again.
• 18:06
  Casey: Who else is on either ballot isn't in today's sources.
• 18:09
  Riley: The sources list the incumbents and one challenger.
• 18:12
  Casey: Everything small about this region argues for accountability: nobody can hide at the grocery store. Then look at the record. Two directors with nothing to defend. One trustee with nobody against him. A mayor whose record in office we can't describe from the sources. A council candidate facing a lawsuit that, as far as we know, is unresolved. Small works as accountability only where someone checks.
• 18:35
  Riley: Voters did check on the mayor's office. Cobb in 2018, Rathor in 2022, and Cobb out in third. That's accountability from the people who show up.
• 18:46
  Casey: Turnout is the part to watch. In 2022 Williams Lake turnout was about 38 to 39 percent, above the provincial average of 29.2, so it's a town that does show up. Nothing says that reaches the regional district.
• 18:59
  Riley: Fair. Then the town's habit is the asset to build on.
• 19:03
  Casey: A concrete test, since the question is whether the staff and time exist. Ask each candidate, and ask the city and the regional district, to list what has been deferred because there weren't people to do it. Not what's been built. What's been put off. A public list.
• 19:18
  Riley: A deferred-items list. It would show what staff size means in practice.
• 19:23
  Casey: It would also show whether anyone's tracking it. If nobody can produce one, that's an answer too.
• 19:29
  Riley: Candidates can answer that at a forum in two minutes, and a town that votes at 39 percent can ask. If you've got a forum question, or a candidate record we missed, send it to feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a. We'll read what comes in before the 17th. Enjoy the dry Saturday.
• 19:47
  Casey: I'd put the deferred-items list on the first agenda after the vote, and I'll be watching to see whether it exists. Talk to you Monday.