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Arts, Culture And Digital Storytelling · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Casey: Hey there, good to have you. Today on the show we've got Williams Lake's mayor race, where Surinderpal Rathor won a fresh term over Walt Cobb, and Quesnel's new mayor, Coralee Oakes, who beat Ron Paull and Brian Waters. We're also digging into the State Department jazz tours of the fifties and who really owned the credibility on that stage. Plus the Nuxalk family moving back into Nusq'lst. Stay with us.
• 0:36
  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 Monday, October 19th, 2026. Today's theme is Arts, Culture & Digital Storytelling. 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. We're looking at how music and theatre get made, recorded, and staged far from the big-city circuit, and who ends up trusted with the story.
• 1:06
  Casey: Quick weather check. Out at Horsefly Lake this morning it's overcast and around 4 degrees, with a high of 10 and a low of 2 today, and a 6 percent chance of precipitation. Across the Cariboo, 100 Mile House, Williams Lake, and Quesnel are all around 2 with overcast skies, and Anahim Lake is around 0.
• 1:25
  Casey: Into the news.
• 1:27
  Riley: Most of today's news lands in our own backyard, and a lot of it is ballots counted over the weekend.
• 1:34
  Casey: In the Cariboo Regional District, two of the three South Cariboo directors kept their seats in the October 17th municipal election. Margo Wagner retained Electoral Area H with 81 per cent of the vote. Al Richmond held Area G with 68.9 per cent, or 641 votes, against two challengers. The third seat changed hands. Incumbent Eric de Vries lost Area L to Dan Parker, who took 33 per cent of the vote, or 286 ballots, in a four-candidate race.
• 2:02
  Riley: A third of the vote wins it in Area L. In a small electorate, that's a few hundred neighbours deciding.
• 2:09
  Riley: In Williams Lake, Surinderpal Rathor has been re-elected mayor, with preliminary results giving him 2,116 votes. He beat former mayor Walt Cobb, the same challenger who defeated him in 2014 and 2018. Rathor served more than 20 years as a councillor before first winning the mayor's chair in 2022. The official results are set for Wednesday, October 21st.
• 2:35
  Casey: Across B.C., voters ousted many incumbent mayors. The Tyee reports the list runs from Surrey and Langley to Prince George and Kamloops. In Kamloops, Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson, who had been at the centre of a series of lawsuits, finished fourth in a six-person field with 12 per cent. Former councillor Mike O'Reilly topped it with 44 per cent. Of seven councillors trying to return, three were re-elected.
• 2:59
  Riley: Three of seven councillors back means voters blamed the council too, not only the mayor.
• 3:05
  Riley: In Quesnel, Coralee Oakes has been elected mayor. Oakes won 2,137 votes against Ron Paull's 324 and Brian Waters' 58. Four incumbent councillors were re-elected: Mitch Vik, Scott Elliot, Tony Goulet, and Laurey-Anne Roodenburg. Debra McKelvie and Martin Runge did not make it back. Newcomers Jeremy Drew and Ryan Adams won seats, and Drew had the top council count at 1,281. Of 7,806 estimated eligible voters, 2,539 cast ballots in the council race.
• 3:38
  Casey: In the District of Wells, Jillian Merrick won the mayor's chair with 85 votes, against Rocky Nenka at 56. Incumbent councillor Josh-Trotter Wanner was re-elected with 90. Newcomers Miriam Dumitra, Elyssia Sasaki, and Eric Andersen took the other three seats, with 79, 76, and 70 votes. Preliminary results are from CivicInfo BC, so the council is three new faces and one returning.
• 4:02
  Riley: The school boards are settled too. In the Cariboo-Chilcotin School District, incumbents Melissa Coates and Mary Forbes kept their seats in Zones 4 and 5. Coates won 83 votes to 21, and Forbes won 280 to 157. In Zone 1, Ella Brown won with 230 votes. Michael Franklin, Jenny Philbrick, and Williams Shepherd were acclaimed, so nobody ran against them. In Quesnel, Lisa Boudreau topped the polls with 1,787 votes, and Julia-Anne Runge was re-elected. Lisa Scott, Tarin Lefebvre, Mike Page, and Tracy Telford are new to the board.
• 4:39
  Casey: Three acclaimed seats in one district. Nobody on the ballot was challenging them.
• 4:45
  Casey: The Williams Lake Mustangs split their home weekend. On Friday, October 9th, they lost 4-2 to the Kamloops Storm at the Cariboo Memorial Recreation Complex. Kamloops scored twice in the second period, and Logan Hauk answered for Williams Lake in the third. On Saturday, October 10th, the Mustangs won 4-3 over the Osoyoos Coyotes. Ivan Anderson stopped 36 of 40 shots in the first game.
• 5:10
  Riley: Off the Cariboo, the Nuxalk family of Kmalsuuncw, also known as Orden Mack, and his mother Nuskmata has moved into the village site of Nusq'lst in the Bella Coola Valley. The last time someone lived at the Nuxalk townsite was 1862, when forced removal and smallpox emptied many villages. Three generations now live there. What started as a hunting cabin became a permanent family home when Kmalsuuncw became a father, built with help from cousins, uncles, and other supporters.
• 5:41
  Casey: The inaugural Okanagan Open ran October 15th to 18th at the Vernon Pickleball Association complex, in the Okanagan, south and east of the Cariboo. It offered a $10,000 prize purse, and more than 400 players registered before the tournament sold out. Tournament director Richard Chambers said the field brought a new level of competition to the region.
• 6:04
  Riley: ABC Vancouver, the civic party, spent more than $62,000 on social media ads in Vancouver's election, according to a Vancouver Sun data analysis. The Green party spent about $355 on the same platforms.
• 6:17
  Casey: Spending isn't reach, but the feed is where a lot of voters now decide who they believe.
• 6:23
  Casey: Fast Company ran a piece by a professor of management information systems at Drexel University. An AI system performs reliably for months, and the employee reviewing its recommendations learns that close scrutiny rarely changes the outcome. Then the system makes an error or stalls. The employee has to step in and remains responsible, but may not know how to do the task by hand.
• 6:45
  Riley: The months of good output are the inherited trust. The first failure tests whether anyone still has the skill.
• 6:53
  Riley: Promenade House, from the architecture studio gm, sits on the shore of a lake inside an extensive garden. The architects describe a residence that does not reveal itself at once. A winding path through the vegetation leads to the building, and the path sets up the arrival. The project takes its name from walking and observing.
• 7:15
  Casey: The Forbes Innovation story covers the EcoShark project in Brazil, which is studying sharks through satellite tracking, genetics, contaminants, diet, and health.
• 7:25
  Riley: ScienceAlert reports a team led by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found evidence of pair density waves on the surface of uranium ditelluride. Physicists predicted the pattern in 2007. The results, published in PNAS, show the pattern persisting outside the superconducting state, which the team says has never been seen before.
• 7:48
  Casey: New Atlas covers MIT's SANDO navigation system for drones in disaster zones. It plans a flight corridor around where hazards could move, without needing a map. The only input it needs is the top speed of the obstacles. The work was published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
• 8:04
  Riley: NYT Business reports that China's official statistics show exports stabilizing overall growth. A prolonged housing crash, sluggish consumer spending, and falling investment have left the economy leaning on what it sells abroad. A stable growth figure can still hide which engine is doing the work, and for a region that sells much of what it produces to buyers far away, that difference matters.
• 8:29
  Casey: The headline number is steady. The engine underneath isn't the same one.
• 8:33
  Casey: Next, the library branches that give you a free connection in Williams Lake, Quesnel, and 100 Mile House.
• 8:41
  Riley: It's BC Library Week, and the Cariboo Regional District Library is more than books. You can get free internet access, take part in digital literacy programs, and use community spaces in Williams Lake, Quesnel, 100 Mile House, and beyond. Find the branches and programs at cln.ca.
• 8:59
  Casey: Libraries carry more of the region's digital access than most press releases admit, so it's a good week to walk in.
• 9:05
  Casey: Our deep dive is on who tells the story and who keeps the right to tell it.
• 9:11
  Casey: The State Department started sending jazz musicians abroad in 1955 and 1956. Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Dave Brubeck all went. When a band walks onto a stage in another country, whose credibility is on the line? The musicians spent decades building it, and the government bought a share. So is a reputation something a person builds on the bandstand, or something a sponsor can inherit and spend?
• 9:36
  Riley: Built on the bandstand, at least at first. An audience that has only heard propaganda about America hears a Black trumpet player and a working band, and the picture changes in the room. Time and PBS document the routes through Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and newly decolonized Africa and Asia. No ministry can write that picture. The audience builds it.
• 9:58
  Casey: And the room had a price tag on it.
• 10:00
  Riley: It had a cost, and the musicians knew it. PBS notes that many of them came from segregated backgrounds and faced a painful dilemma about representing American values while racism persisted at home. That isn't a script handed down by the ministry. It's a band deciding what to say from a stage it was sent to.
• 10:19
  Casey: Armstrong toured Italy in 1931, under Mussolini. The Council on Foreign Relations documents his 1960 goodwill concert in Leopoldville, in the Congo. Jazz was travelling long before the program existed.
• 10:31
  Riley: The appeal came first. The program bought the plane tickets.
• 10:35
  Casey: And the program chose the audience. Some scholarship, including a 2025 piece in Retrospect Journal, reads the tours as a cultural proxy conflict that used the musicians as de facto CIA mouthpieces, with Africa as the stage. That reading is an argument, not a finding. Still, the musicians didn't pick the itinerary, and the summary doesn't want to say that out loud.
• 10:57
  Riley: The reading is about motive. The audience wasn't reading the State Department memo. They heard Ellington, and they heard someone from Armstrong's world say something on a bandstand that no press officer would have approved in advance. That's where the credibility came from.
• 11:14
  Casey: Pushing back from a stage you were sent to is real. It doesn't change who wrote the route.
• 11:19
  Riley: Sponsored doesn't mean insincere. Promoters pay bands too, and nobody calls a set fake because a booking agent sent the act. The sincerity lives in the performance. The sponsor only decides where it gets played.
• 11:32
  Casey: The "freedom" framing in that summary does the selling for the sponsor. The musicians' authenticity was the asset. Nobody in the room was paying for it, but the State Department was. Who paid for the thing, and who got to spend it?
• 11:45
  Riley: Then the asset survived the sale. Ellington went back on the road, and audiences kept showing up. A sponsor can spend credibility, but it can't manufacture a crowd that has already decided to listen.
• 11:57
  Casey: The crowd came to hear the band, and the band's name went on the program the government printed. That still doesn't say whose credibility got spent.
• 12:05
  Riley: Fine. The band had the credibility, and the program spent a share of it on tickets. Both can be true at once, and I'd keep both in the record.
• 12:14
  Casey: Both can be true. I don't trust a press release to tell you that.
• 12:17
  Casey: Now bring it to the Cariboo. Music here runs on the same question. Who books the room, and who's on the bill?
• 12:24
  Riley: Williams Lake has about 10,700 people, and Quesnel about 9,000. That's enough for a good local scene and not enough to carry a touring circuit alone. A touring act comes through, plays one night, and the trust for that night rests with whoever put up the poster and whether the sound was right.
• 12:43
  Casey: And the poster has names on it. Some of those names have been on Cariboo posters for decades. Is the name doing the work, or the last hall full of people who came out on a cold Thursday in February?
• 12:55
  Riley: A band plays a hall, the hall earns a reputation for its sound and for paying the people working the room, and bands talk to each other. Word of mouth is the distribution network. Nobody buys it with a campaign.
• 13:08
  Casey: Paying the people working the room. Put that in the ledger. The sound tech and the door volunteers carry the reputation, and they're the first to quit the sign-up sheet. A venue's name won't pay them.
• 13:19
  Riley: Which is why the venues that last write it down. Who was paid, what the door took, what the sound system needed.
• 13:26
  Casey: Most small halls don't keep that record. Volunteer groups rotate. The binder goes into a closet.
• 13:32
  Riley: Then the structural question is who holds the binder. The board, a volunteer, or the person who ran sound in 2019 and moved away.
• 13:41
  Casey: The person who moved away is the one who knows where the cables went. That's a bus-factor problem, and a festival with a famous founder has the same one. Mildly funny, until the founder is the bus.
• 13:53
  Riley: Berlin gives a cleaner test of inherited versus built. The Living Archive of techno culture opened 3,400 square metres of previously unused basement beneath a former East Berlin power station. Office ParkScheerbarth developed the concept with Tresor founder Dimitri Hegemann, and the permanent archive was first announced in 2015.
• 14:14
  Casey: A scene built on anonymity now has a basement with a permit. The exhibition "Dancefloors After 1989" ran for five weeks as a test. Who curates a scene that was defined by not having a curator?
• 14:26
  Riley: The people who were on the floor, if the design works. The show was designed using material the building itself supplied. I like that detail. The archive was built out of the basement, not imported from a museum.
• 14:39
  Casey: Heritage is what you call a scene once you've stopped needing it to be underground. The founder's name opens the door. The room keeps the record. Who keeps the lights on after the five weeks?
• 14:50
  Riley: The organisers and architects describe the concept and the test run. Long-term funding I can't confirm, so I won't guess at it.
• 14:58
  Casey: A five-week run is a test. A permanent archive is a budget line. Those are different documents.
• 15:03
  Riley: One is a proof of concept. The other has to survive a board meeting.
• 15:08
  Casey: So the Berlin question is the Cariboo question with a bigger budget. Who gets to say what the room was?
• 15:13
  Riley: The most urgent version of who gets to tell the story is in India right now, and it's a different order of problem. Keep it to what's documented.
• 15:23
  Casey: NPR and AP report that authorities removed more than 130 million names from voter rolls during what the Election Commission calls a Special Intensive Revision. The Modi government describes it as a clean-up of dead and duplicate entries. The Election Commission rejects the claim that the exercise was rigged. The opposition-linked CJP alleges the removals benefited Prime Minister Modi. Critics say more voters could be disenfranchised.
• 15:48
  Riley: What exposed the deletions was the reporting, the roll comparisons, and the citizen video people posted from the field. Platforms and phones are the reason anyone can check the numbers. The Election Commission's position deserves airtime, and it gets it here.
• 16:04
  Casey: Then separate the parts. The 130 million figure is consistent across outlets. The motive is disputed. The detention counts are a different category. The International Federation of Journalists reports at least 30 journalists detained during the Delhi protests. CIVICUS describes thousands detained, and activists and journalists being criminalised. Rahul Gandhi was reported detained in New Delhi in early October.
• 16:28
  Riley: Three different kinds of claims. The IFJ figure is a count of journalists, and CIVICUS is a wider measure of detentions, so they can't be stacked as if they match. Check each one on its own.
• 16:40
  Casey: Al Jazeera's framing is a government at war with its critics. That's the critical reading, and it's what the content creators in the story would say about their own week. When a creator is detained, the storyteller's trust is whatever they can still post.
• 16:54
  Riley: Or the blocking tells you which footage was dangerous. Pressure on creators can be a sign they're being believed. The detention data doesn't tell us which reading is right.
• 17:05
  Casey: The incentive argument is clear enough. It still doesn't answer the detention counts.
• 17:10
  Riley: It doesn't. The disputed motive and the verified count stay separate, and I can't close that gap from here.
• 17:17
  Casey: The Cariboo side is smaller. A local creator filming a council meeting has no detention risk. What they do have is the record. Who holds the footage, and who can prove a year later that it's the same file?
• 17:29
  Riley: A raw file with a timestamp and a checksum lets a creator prove the footage is theirs. A checksum is one command and a text file. Most people never see it done once.
• 17:39
  Casey: And most local creators don't keep a second copy anywhere the platform can't take down. A drive on the same desk as the laptop is one fire away from gone.
• 17:48
  Riley: Then the cheap move is an export. Keep the master on a drive in a building you control, and post the clip where the audience already is.
• 17:57
  Casey: Which is fine until the drive and the laptop are both in the same house. Who keeps the copy that's somewhere else?
• 18:03
  Riley: The library is the obvious place to teach it. The Cariboo Regional District Library offers free internet access and digital literacy programs in Williams Lake, Quesnel, and 100 Mile House. A checksum lesson fits in a Saturday session.
• 18:18
  Casey: That's the first answer that puts a person in a chair. Now back to the festival, because that's where the trust question lands.
• 18:25
  Casey: A local festival's reputation for authenticity: is it rebuilt each season by volunteers handing out programs, or inherited from the founders whose names still sell the first ticket?
• 18:36
  Riley: Both. The name sells the first ticket. The conduct sells the second. A festival that keeps its own record of who played, how the bookings were made, and what the artists were paid is building trust every year. One that doesn't is spending it.
• 18:50
  Casey: The record never makes the poster. It's also the part volunteers rotate out of first.
• 18:55
  Riley: A volunteer who stays three years has seen a bad booking and a good one, and that knowledge is the trust. When they leave, it walks out the door with them unless someone wrote it down.
• 19:06
  Casey: Then give the founders their due. A name can carry a festival through a thin season, because people remember what the first year felt like. That's inherited trust, and it's real.
• 19:17
  Riley: It runs out. The founder's name draws the first buyers. By the second or third year, buyers are judging the lineup. Trust that was only inherited gets spent on the first weak program.
• 19:28
  Casey: Quesnel's council lost two incumbents in Saturday's vote, and Wells elected three new faces, according to preliminary CivicInfo BC results. Institutional memory in a small town doesn't sit only in council. Some of it sits with the people who ran the arts volunteers, and that group doesn't appear on any ballot.
• 19:47
  Riley: Which is why the record matters more in a town with turnover. A festival that's been running for decades can lose its founder and its binder in the same year. The record is the only part that survives a change of hands.
• 20:00
  Casey: So who can take the name off the poster if the reputation goes bad? A board run by the same three people for a decade may not want to. Nobody answers that one in a volunteer meeting.
• 20:11
  Riley: Then write the rule before the bad year. A short page with three questions: who was booked, who was paid, and what went wrong last season. It takes an afternoon. It's a binder that outlives the founder.
• 20:24
  Casey: Add one line for the people working the room. Who's paid, and at what rate. If the sound tech is a volunteer, the page should say so. Otherwise the festival's authenticity is built on unpaid labour and nobody is counting it.
• 20:36
  Riley: Agreed on the line. I still say the page does the job. Visible unpaid labour is at least honest.
• 20:42
  Casey: Honest isn't the same as fair. The page tells you who carried the work. It doesn't pay them.
• 20:47
  Riley: A visible record changes what volunteers will put up with, and what the audience will pay for. Next season, that's leverage.
• 20:55
  Casey: Maybe. Until someone shows me a festival that pays its door crew because of a record like that, I'd call the reputation inherited.
• 21:03
  Riley: The open question is who holds the page, and whether a festival in a town this size can keep one past the founder. Send your festival's programs, tips, or corrections to feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a, and we'll see who's keeping one.
• 21:17
  Casey: Read the program before you buy the ticket. Good Monday, everyone.