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Indigenous Lands And Innovation · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Casey: Hey there, good to have you. It's Thursday, so we're on Indigenous Lands and Innovation today. Riley and I are digging into the Pacific Link court challenge, and whether a seat at the table means anything when the decision's already made. We've also got a Forbes question about AI in healthcare and whether rural communities get left behind, plus the Fire In Our Hearts screenings coming to Williams Lake. Stick around.
• 0:37
  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 Thursday, November 5th, 2026. Today's theme is Indigenous Lands & Innovation. Reaching you from the heart of the Cariboo, the homeland of the Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in, and Dakelh nations.
• 0:56
  Riley: And I'm Riley. Today we're looking at Indigenous nations using technology and governance on their own terms, from court filings to cultural burns. Out at Horsefly Lake this morning it's foggy and around 1 degree, with a high of 9, a low of 1, and moderate drizzle through the day, about a 75 percent chance of around 1 millimetre. Across the region, 100 Mile House is around minus 2 under clear skies, Williams Lake is around minus 1 and clear, Quesnel is around 0 and clear, and Tatla Lake is around minus 1 with partly cloudy skies.
• 1:30
  Casey: Over to the news.
• 1:33
  Riley: A lot of today's news is about who gets to decide what happens on the land, and the first stretch is closer to home than usual.
• 1:41
  Casey: Filmmaker Josias Tschanz is bringing his award-winning documentary on the 2018 northern B.C. wildfires to Williams Lake. The Fire In Our Hearts follows residents, First Nations members and firefighters in communities south of Francois Lake, who had to choose between evacuating and staying to protect the land. Tschanz was on the ground for a week with a camera during the fires, and he made the film because he wanted his remote community to have a voice. The screenings are on Saturday, November 7th and Thursday, November 12th, and he hopes the film starts a conversation.
• 2:15
  Riley: Osisko Gold has named Cameron Carter vice-president of construction operations at Barkerville Gold Mines. He'll oversee construction at the Cariboo gold project in central B.C., which a 2025 feasibility study projects at 1.89 million ounces of gold over a ten-year mine life. Carter has more than 18 years in underground mine development, including 15 at Dumas Mining. For the Cariboo, a mine under construction means hiring, housing and traffic on the same roads we already drive.
• 2:47
  Casey: Ten years of shifts, and someone has to house the crews.
• 2:52
  Casey: Okanagan Lake is at its lowest level on record for this time of year. The Okanagan Basin Water Board's Nelson Jatel says crews are working to hold the level back, and the board expects another drought year, which would be the fifth in a row for the valley. Jatel's message was that the region needs to start talking about 2027 now. The Okanagan sits south and east of the Cariboo, so this is a neighbour's problem, but it's a problem about who plans for a dry year before the dry year arrives.
• 3:22
  Riley: Prime Minister Mark Carney says he is very open to a process that reforms, modernizes or abolishes the Indian Act. He has also said any path has to be co-developed with First Nations, along with provincial and territorial partners, and that starting a review doesn't guarantee the Act is ended. The comments followed Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew arguing in Ottawa that the Act should be abolished. Indigenous leaders say any amendments need to include their voices, and they want a First Nations-led process.
• 3:53
  Casey: Carney says "co-developed." Watch who holds the pen on the first draft.
• 3:58
  Casey: First Nations youth, along with NDP Indigenous affairs critic Leah Gazan, held a Parliament Hill news conference on October 28th to warn that three federal bills threaten treaty rights, free, prior and informed consent, and protections for water and land. Those bills are C-39, the Building Canada Strong Act, C-37, the First Nations Clean Water Act, and C-5, which passed in 2025. Gazan's main concern with C-39 is its one-year review timelines and ministerial powers to exempt projects from some environmental and heritage rules.
• 4:30
  Riley: We had C-39 on Saturday. The exemption powers are the part to watch.
• 4:36
  Riley: A national poll by Pollara Strategic, released through the Indigenous Leadership Initiative in September, found 76 per cent of respondents support First Nations cultural burning. Before it was explained, 49 per cent of those surveyed had never heard of Indigenous fire stewardship. Once it was described, 84 per cent said it's important for Canada. The poll surveyed 2,250 people in August. IndigiNews, co-published with The Narwhal, quotes Sheri Lysons, who is Secwépemc from the Adams Lake Indian Band, on decades of fire work. For her, the finding is long overdue.
• 5:13
  Casey: Support in a poll is cheap. Who pays the crews is the test.
• 5:18
  Casey: The $375-million Our Land for the Future initiative in the Northwest Territories put $18,395,700 into Indigenous-led conservation and stewardship in its first year, according to the trust's first annual report. The money goes to Indigenous partners for work caring for lands and waters, and the program also supports Indigenous Guardians, traditional harvesting and sustainable economic opportunities. It is a funded model that pays people to be on the land, which is a different thing from a promise to consult them.
• 5:51
  Riley: Indigenous people in India's Arunachal Pradesh are protesting a planned mega-dam in the Upper Siang district. The Siang Upper Multipurpose Project is meant to counter China's upstream hydropower project, and the protest was held on a football pitch, with speeches about what the dam would mean for the community downstream of it.
• 6:10
  Casey: Upstream power, downstream people. Same argument, different river.
• 6:15
  Casey: The Auditor General tabled a report on Tuesday, November 3rd, in Nunavut's Legislative Assembly, finding the foster care system still fails to meet its own standards. The department still could not consistently show that basic safeguards for children in care were being followed. The Auditor General called the child-and-family-services system in crisis in 2023, and a 2025 follow-up found action had begun, but this year's audit says substantial work remained.
• 6:44
  Riley: A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies finds Chinese research vessels spend more time near Pacific undersea cables than vessels from nearly 50 other nations. Those cables carry most of the world's international internet traffic, so the report puts a navy's routine in front of anyone who thinks the internet lives only in the sky.
• 7:07
  Casey: Spending more time near cables isn't the same as cutting one.
• 7:12
  Casey: StatCan figures show life expectancy in B.C. is lower in the Interior and the North than in Metro Vancouver. Richmond residents live an average of 86.8 years, the highest in the province, against 80.2 years in the Interior health region. The Vancouver Sun reports that the North also trails Metro Vancouver.
• 7:30
  Riley: Six and a half years between those two numbers, and the Interior health region covers the Cariboo.
• 7:38
  Riley: Google has said it won't give schools a way to switch off AI Overviews, the machine-generated answers that sit above search results. Starting next year, schools that want the feature gone will have to block search altogether. An IT administrator at an elementary-middle school had asked Google's support forums for an off switch, and WIRED reports educators and parents across the US were stunned. Our voices run on Google's text-to-speech on some episodes, so we are not neutral on this one.
• 8:09
  Casey: Block search, or take the answer. That's the menu.
• 8:13
  Casey: AI coding agents are moving software work from writing code toward directing models, reviewing their output and making architecture decisions. U.S. undergraduate computer science enrolment fell more than 12 per cent this fall, and graduate enrolment fell more than 10 per cent. Studies cited by Bloomberg and t3n put employment among developers aged 22 to 25 down about 20 per cent since late 2022. A JetBrains survey of more than 15,000 professional developers, published in August, found 90 per cent use coding agents at least weekly. Business Insider quotes OpenAI employee Peter Steinberger predicting the traditional software engineer job would disappear if AI progress continued at even half its current pace.
• 8:58
  Riley: Juniors are how seniors get made. Fewer juniors, fewer seniors later.
• 9:03
  Riley: The Tyee reports Alberta's "agriculture first" rules generally bar solar on high-quality farmland. A project can only go ahead if it shows it can coexist with farming, which means keeping 80 per cent of the land's agricultural productivity. The Tyee's piece, drawing on communistnews.net's coverage, argues the rules block wind and solar while gas plants get prime land, and that two deceptions drove the change.
• 9:30
  Casey: Eighty per cent of the land's productivity. Who measures that?
• 9:35
  Casey: Germany's hydrogen backbone carried renewable hydrogen made during commissioning at Lingen to Marl Chemical Park, about 120 kilometres away, on August 4th, 2026. RWE and its partners announced it, and the electrolysers, converted natural gas pipelines and industrial receiving infrastructure all worked together. CleanTechnica's headline asks the question that matters now: the pipe works, but the market still has to add up.
• 10:00
  Riley: Reusing old gas pipe is the cheap part. Buyers cost more.
• 10:05
  Riley: A maker has built a very large wall-mounted display that shows airborne particle levels in changing colours. The build uses a PM2.5 sensor, a huge addressable LED seven-segment display, and a small Seeed Studio Xiao board, and it logs readings over USB. Hackaday notes it's not the first air-quality monitor it has covered, but this one is built for a workshop that needs to see the number from across the room.
• 10:32
  Casey: Brian Kirk, who manages Washington state's oil spill prevention program, told The Tyee that oil supertankers face sharp turns and reef-dotted channels in the Salish Sea. He spent two decades as a U.S. Navy officer, and he says a larger ship with that much mass can get into trouble quickly if anything goes wrong. Kirk says those hazards make supertankers unsuitable for the new West Coast pipeline project, and he is focused on the first time these ships would navigate those channels.
• 11:00
  Riley: Forbes asks whether AI in healthcare will leave rural areas behind. It opens with an emergency-room pediatrician who has seen many children hurt playing sports, and asks what happens when the child is in a rural or suburban part of Georgia, far from the academic centres in most cities. The reason it's worth ending on is simple: the tool gets built in the city, and the drive is still a long one.
• 11:25
  Casey: Before we go further, a word from one of our own nations.
• 11:29
  Casey: Williams Lake First Nation, known in the language as T'exelcemc, is a self-governing nation with programs in language revitalization, housing and land stewardship. Those are three things a nation has to keep running in every season, not only when the funding announcement comes out. If you want to learn more about the work, the place to start is wlfn.ca.
• 11:50
  Riley: Language, housing and land in one nation is a good list to know, and a lot of Cariboo listeners probably know someone who works in one of those programs.
• 11:59
  Riley: Which brings us to the court fight over the Pacific Link pipeline, and the question sitting under it.
• 12:05
  Riley: When a process is flawed before it starts, is a seat at the table worth more than being right about the flaw? That's the question under the Pacific Link court challenge. The facts come first, because the courts will look at them first.
• 12:20
  Casey: The prime minister listed the project as a national-interest project on October 1st under the Building Canada Act. The listing came first. Consultation comes after.
• 12:29
  Riley: The Act's consultation provisions are the battleground, and the project is big: about a million barrels of crude a day, moving from Bruderheim in Alberta to a deepwater port near Delta.
• 12:41
  Casey: The St'át'imc complaints aren't only about the designation. They point to a summer timeline that runs straight through harvesting and wildfire season, incomplete information about the route, and what they call a narrow, geographic approach that leaves out nations whose territory isn't on the line.
• 12:57
  Riley: Then there's the line I'd want any negotiator to hear. Tsartlip's chief negotiator, Adam Olsen, reported that the Major Projects Office told them, once a project is listed, "it's not about if the project is going to go forward, but how." That sentence says the decision is made and the table is for the details.
• 13:17
  Casey: If "if" is settled, "how" is a formality. A nation that sits down for "how" has agreed to "if" just by showing up.
• 13:23
  Riley: Showing up isn't agreeing. Fort McKay First Nation Chief Raymond Powder, in the Alberta oilsands, called the pipeline "a positive thing" and said his community is excited to take an equity stake. He also said governments need to understand First Nations' perspectives, and he expects Indigenous buy-in as long as environmental concerns are addressed.
• 13:44
  Casey: Powder sits on the Alberta side, where the crude starts. The St'át'imc sit on the water where it ends up. Liberal MP Corey Hogan called the 10 per cent equity stake a "floor not a ceiling." A floor is where a negotiation starts, and it's offered at the design stage, so the question is whether it buys influence or only a share of profits.
• 14:04
  Riley: It's a floor with capital behind it. Alberta's Indigenous Opportunities Corporation says it's ready to support co-ownership of Pacific Link and the Pathways carbon capture project, with financing through federal and Alberta loan guarantee programs. A nation that owns part of the pipe has a seat in the room where the pipe gets run.
• 14:25
  Casey: A seat in the room where the pipe gets run is not a veto over the rivers it crosses. Equity is about revenue. The St'át'imc argument is about salmon, fisheries and title, and a share of the profits doesn't touch any of that.
• 14:37
  Riley: Agreed on the veto. But the legal question is open. The Building Canada Act's preamble is non-binding. Phillips Barristers and McMillan LLP both note it doesn't make the UN Declaration law in Canada. So free, prior and informed consent is being tested in court, not settled. A live case is a lever.
• 14:55
  Casey: So the Crown has a gap in the law and is asking nations to fill it by showing up. A nation can't close a legal gap by attending the meeting.
• 15:04
  Riley: Then the court is the peaceful option. A judicial review keeps the dispute inside the rules. It's a structured move, not a walk-out into a public fight. We covered the Federal Court filing on Wednesday, and the chiefs' framing is that the designation itself is the problem, which is a question for a judge.
• 15:22
  Casey: Peaceful for who? The chiefs want the courts to slow the process down. But a lawsuit hardens positions. Once you're in front of a judge, nobody's negotiating. And the filings come from many nations at once, B.C. and Alberta both, including Cold Lake First Nations, so the pressure isn't one voice.
• 15:39
  Riley: Many voices is a strength. Boston Bar, Cheam, Lower Nicola, Kwantlen, Kwikwetlem, Skeetchestn and Tsartlip each argue their own standing. The Crown has to answer each filing, not one letter it can file and forget.
• 15:52
  Casey: Or it answers the ones it can dismiss on standing and leaves the rest waiting. Whose voice counts matters.
• 15:58
  Riley: Right. Standing is the next fight.
• 16:00
  Casey: The St'át'imc insist on the Nation as a whole. Individual communities can sit down with Ottawa. The Nation can't be broken into friendlier tables and still call the result consent.
• 16:10
  Riley: A negotiator who accepts talks with one community can still win real things for that community. Benefit-sharing. Jobs. A say on how the route is built. Waiting for every community to agree can leave everyone with nothing.
• 16:23
  Casey: That's how the record gets built. Ottawa can show it consulted a piece of the Nation, and the piece that sat down becomes the evidence that the whole Nation was there. The map decides who gets consulted, not the people whose river it crosses. That's what the narrow geographic complaint is about.
• 16:40
  Riley: The Tsartlip raised information on Wednesday, and that's fixable. Information can be handed over. Nobody can hand over a whole Nation's consent in a single meeting.
• 16:50
  Casey: You can see the difference between information handed over and information that changes the decision. The chiefs say the designation came first. The information is coming in after the answer has been filed.
• 17:03
  Riley: Which is an argument for going to court and forcing the information to exist before the decision is final.
• 17:10
  Casey: Or it's an argument that a judge should decide whether the process counts at all, and that's a long way from a negotiator's table.
• 17:17
  Riley: The table is still where the conditions get written. A nation that walks away from it gives up the chance to put a fish-passage requirement or a spill-response plan into a permit.
• 17:29
  Casey: Only if the permit is still open. Designation puts the project on a fast track, and the fast track is running through the harvest season. Nobody sets a consultation schedule around a fish count.
• 17:40
  Riley: Then the stakes matter, because that's where the choice gets real. The concern on Wednesday was rivers and streams, the Fraser River salmon and the fishing rights attached to them. The filings ask for a review of the designation, not a verdict on the project. That leaves room for a deal on benefit-sharing later.
• 17:59
  Casey: Room that exists only if the court gives the Nation some leverage first. If the court says no, the room is gone, and the benefit-sharing talks happen on the Crown's timeline.
• 18:10
  Riley: That's a real risk. But a deal signed under a designation that a judge later strikes down is a deal the Nation can renegotiate. The Crown would have to come back to the table.
• 18:21
  Casey: On the Crown's timeline, and with the Nation's signature already on the first page. Nobody gets a second look at the schedule.
• 18:27
  Riley: That's the point of a review. It gives the first look a second look.
• 18:32
  Casey: Fine. Then the question for the Cariboo. APTN places St'át'imc territory in the Cariboo-Chilcotin region, so this isn't a case from somewhere else. On Tuesday we argued over repealing the northern tanker ban. Today the question is who's at the table when the cargo changes, and who has to live with the spill.
• 18:49
  Riley: Working towns want the jobs. Williams Lake and Quesnel have built around resource work for decades, and a long standoff with no visible path to benefit is hard on people who need the paycheque. The Nation's choice has to be one locals can see a route through.
• 19:06
  Casey: Those towns carry the spill risk without a vote. That Brian Kirk interview from the roundup is the same kind of problem. The people downstream don't get to choose the ship. They get the shoreline.
• 19:17
  Riley: So the Nations along the route need a binding say, not a consultation that stops at the boundary of the map.
• 19:24
  Casey: "Binding say" only means something if someone defines the standard. Right now the Crown has listed the project, and the Act doesn't write free, prior and informed consent into the law.
• 19:34
  Riley: Which makes this a test case. The Crown calls it "how, not if," and the courts get to decide whether "how" can be lawful at all. Consultation is only lawful when it could change the answer, and the chiefs say it couldn't.
• 19:48
  Casey: So who gets to say the process has become one that counts as consent? The Nation, the court, or the Crown? Those answers don't match, and the Act doesn't pick one.
• 19:57
  Riley: I'd say the court. Going to court forces a real process to exist, because the Crown has to produce a record that can be tested. Refusing to lend a name only works if the other side has to live with the refusal.
• 20:11
  Casey: I'd say the Nation, and the court only confirms it later. A court filing can end the goodwill that a seat at the table would have kept. Sometimes the relationship survives the lawsuit. Sometimes it's the thing the lawsuit ends.
• 20:24
  Riley: Then it's open. Does a court case keep the relationship alive by forcing a real process, or end it and leave the process to whoever wins? If you're in a community on the same water, send what you know to feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a, especially what the Crown told your nation about "how."
• 20:41
  Casey: I don't know which, and the record so far doesn't show it. We'll be back tomorrow, and thanks for listening this Thursday.
• 20:48
  Casey: We haven't actually talked with anyone from First Nations communications teams for this one, and that's a conversation we'd really welcome. If you're doing that work out here, reach out, because we want to hear it from you directly.
• 21:01
  Riley: Cariboo Signals is produced by Erich Zirnhelt — scripts by Claude, today's voices by OpenAI TTS, theme by Suno. Weather data from Open-Meteo. Today's episode included additional web research via Brave Search and Kagi. Automated with GitHub Actions, hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Find us at cariboo signals dot c-a.