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Cariboo Local Affairs · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Riley: Hey there, glad you could make it. Today on Cariboo Local Affairs we're looking at the Williams Lake mayor's race, where Surinderpal Rathor won a second term over Walt Cobb, and at the Lac La Hache arena, closed for the season after an engineering report found structural problems. Plus, we're asking the question voters should ask about every candidate on today's ballot: is the trust they're asking for earned on the job, or inherited from a name? Let's get into it.
• 0:42
  Riley: Welcome to Cariboo Signals, an AI-generated review of the latest tech news and ideas that impact our rural communities. I'm Riley. It's Saturday, October 24th, 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.
• 1:03
  Casey: And I'm Casey. Today we're looking at the councils, school boards and ballots in our own towns, and at what they have to earn from the people who vote for them.
• 1:12
  Casey: Out at Horsefly Lake this morning it's overcast and around 1 degree, with a high of 7 and a low of 0 today, and a 37 percent chance of precipitation. Across the Cariboo, 100 Mile House is around minus 2 under overcast skies, Williams Lake is around 0 with fog, Quesnel is around minus 1 and overcast, and Redstone has slight snowfall at minus 2. Heads up if you're driving into Williams Lake this morning, because that fog is sitting right at freezing.
• 1:40
  Riley: Into the news, and a lot of today's coverage lands in our own backyard, with polls open across the province.
• 1:47
  Riley: Voters across B.C. head to the polls today, and a good share of this morning's news is about who holds office in our own towns.
• 1:56
  Riley: The B.C. Conservatives still lead in the polls on the eve of the vote. We covered the polls Friday, so the new detail is the spread. Angus Reid puts the Conservatives at 43 to 49 per cent and the NDP at 40 to 46, with a margin of error of three points. Mainstreet has the Conservatives six points ahead. Philippe Fournier, who runs the 338Canada aggregator, told Black Press that B.C. elections rarely produce blowouts. In 2024 the NDP won the popular vote by about two points and landed on 47 seats, the exact majority threshold.
• 2:31
  Casey: Two points got them a majority in 2024. A three-point lead inside a three-point margin of error is a lead you can't bank on.
• 2:41
  Casey: NDP Leader David Eby is still explaining why he called a snap election with two years left on his party's mandate. In Surrey on Friday he said people are "very surprised and frustrated," and that he should have done a better job of telling them how stalled the legislature was. He called that his biggest regret of the campaign. Conservative and Green leaders call the call a "cynical" power grab. The Tribune reports that since 2024 the NDP has governed with a one-vote majority and has struggled to round up votes for hard bills, including amendments to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. We gave the local candidate lists for Cariboo-Chilcotin and Prince George-North Cariboo on Friday, and Doerkson and Clare are both sitting MLAs back on the ballot.
• 3:26
  Riley: The Tyee has its roundup of the municipal results, and we went through the count Monday. Its framing is that from Surrey to Prince George, voters booted incumbents, and the story reads the vote as a signal for change. Our part of that map is Quesnel and Williams Lake, where the mayor's chair changed hands in one and stayed put in the other.
• 3:48
  Casey: We went through the trustee results Monday too. In Zone 1 of the Quesnel board, Ella Brown won over three challengers.
• 3:57
  Riley: The Rolf Zeis Memorial Arena at Lac La Hache is closed for the rest of the 2026 to 2027 season. We covered the closure Tuesday. What's new is the sequence. The Lac La Hache Community Club operates and maintains the building. In September a seasonal perimeter check turned up structural issues, so the club hired Octo Engineering of Williams Lake, which came out on October 13th. The club put out a notice on Saturday the 17th, effective immediately. Club president Bev Fry says the restriction on public access was immediate, and the club wants a full assessment of what repairs would cost before it picks a next step.
• 4:37
  Casey: A volunteer club is now holding the repair question for a building the whole community uses.
• 4:44
  Casey: A dune-planting supervisor on Florida's coast describes a rare February 2026 freeze at 26 degrees Fahrenheit, which burned plants that usually handle drought, wind and salt. Most of the east coast plants survived and came back to robust health. The piece is headlined as Florida farmers making the move to regenerative agriculture, and the freeze is the argument for it.
• 5:07
  Riley: The International Bureau of Weights and Measures says it will stop issuing leap seconds in May 2027. Thirty-two have been added since 1972 to keep atomic clocks in step with Earth's rotation, which is slowing mostly because of tidal friction from the moon. WIRED says the decision has major ramifications for technology people rely on every day. The piece also notes that the change heads off what could have been the world's first negative leap second.
• 5:35
  Casey: Somebody still has to make every system switch over, and that's the part nobody reads about.
• 5:41
  Riley: Cranbrook council has released a covenant on the former Tembec lands. The covenant was registered in 1972, and the restrictions it carried will now be governed by the city's zoning bylaw. The BC Supreme Court ordered the property sold on August 6th, as part of foreclosure proceedings between the City of Cranbrook and Peak Cranbrook Properties Ltd. The sale goes to 1271410 B.C. Ltd., with Colliers handling it. The release goes to the city's legal department next, and any concerns would bring it back to council.
• 6:16
  Casey: Researchers at the National University of Singapore, led by Assistant Professor Tural Khudiyev, built a touchscreen out of electronic fibers that combine individually addressable LEDs with touch sensing. They wove 54 of the fibers into a sleeve, which they say is the first touchscreen built directly into a garment. Hackster's headline stresses that it survives the washing machine. It's still a lab sleeve.
• 6:40
  Riley: Clothing as an interface. Next we'll see whether anybody sells it.
• 6:45
  Riley: Meta reported $64.6 billion in third-quarter revenue, up 26 percent from a year earlier. It also posted its first quarterly free-cash-flow shortfall in at least a decade. It spent about $35 billion on capital expenditures in the quarter and forecasts as much as $145 billion in 2026. The company created new nonvoting Class C shares to raise money for AI without giving up voting control. Zuckerberg, who had considered leaving California over a proposed billionaire wealth tax, committed to stay in California, or wherever Meta is headquartered, for eight years. California voters decide that tax, Proposition 40, on November 3rd.
• 7:28
  Casey: Barclays plans to cut about 5,000 jobs by the end of 2026, roughly 5 percent of its global workforce. About 60 percent of the cuts fall in support functions, including development. Pretax profit rose 12 percent to £2.3 billion, below analysts' expectations. The chief executive, C. S. Venkatakrishnan, said "We will employ the AI at scale but AI is the icing on the cake not the cake." Unite's general secretary, Sharon Graham, called the cuts a short-term response and argued that staff should be trained to stay employed.
• 8:02
  Riley: University of Massachusetts researchers built a bio-hybrid harvester that generates electricity from human cells, aimed at powering wearables and implants. The article's point is that batteries are bulky and run out, while the body runs on chemical, mechanical and electrical energy around the clock.
• 8:22
  Casey: University of Chicago engineers developed a computational method that simulates the whole optical cycle of spin defects in diamond and silicon carbide, including internal conversion, the step that has been hardest to predict. The findings appear in Physical Review Letters. The team says the method could help design materials for quantum sensors and for renewable energy conversion and storage.
• 8:45
  Riley: Goldman Sachs economists say their baseline has up to 9 percent of workers displaced from their current roles by AI, which they put at around 15 million people in the US. Last year the bank's chief economist put the figure at 6 to 7 percent. The economists also say a recession could speed AI adoption, and that the labour effect will build gradually rather than arriving as an abrupt shock.
• 9:11
  Casey: Gradual is the word to hold them to.
• 9:14
  Casey: In Washington, some members of Congress are looking at ways to help workers if AI layoffs turn into mass layoffs. The headline points to a bill to bolster the nation's unemployment insurance program, which is the safety net that would catch those workers first.
• 9:29
  Riley: Next, a local group that catches people too: the Williams Lake Women's Centre.
• 9:35
  Riley: The Williams Lake Women's Centre provides crisis support, advocacy, and community programming for women and families across the Williams Lake area. If you need support, or you want to know what they offer, start at wlwomenscentre.org. The people behind those programs are answering the hard calls and doing the follow-up that never shows up in a headline.
• 9:56
  Casey: Crisis support and advocacy under one roof is a lot of load. Good to see them featured.
• 10:01
  Riley: Which brings us to the Deep Dive, starting with the mayor's chair.
• 10:06
  Riley: Surinderpal Rathor won a second term in Williams Lake, and we had the count on Monday. So the question on the table: when voters send someone back to office, is that trust they built on the job, or trust they inherited from a name and a history?
• 10:20
  Casey: Rathor sat on council for more than twenty years before he took the chair in 2022. Long service is a record. But what we have doesn't show his current-term votes, budgets or projects, so I can't call it trust yet.
• 10:33
  Riley: Then look at the challenger. Walt Cobb won in 2018 with 60.4 percent, 1,843 votes to 1,177. In 2022 he finished third with 24.2 percent. In 2026 he lost to Rathor again, 2,116 votes to 1,026. The most recent result is the one that counts for today.
• 10:54
  Casey: The 2018 win is the inheritance. The 2022 and 2026 results are what got spent. And Cobb's career is longer than the three races. The FPAC page says he was a councillor from 1980 to 1990 and mayor for two terms between 1990 and 1996. Wikipedia lists him as a B.C. Liberal MLA for Cariboo South from 2001 to 2005. A Tribune profile says he was mayor in 2017, when the city was evacuated for wildfires.
• 11:24
  Riley: Right. He held the chair in the nineties and in 2017, and he still lost the last two. Voters ran that test twice.
• 11:31
  Casey: Two different tests. 2022 was a four-way race, with Jason Ryll second. 2026 was two names. One two-way margin tells you less than it sounds like.
• 11:41
  Riley: It tells you the people who turned out picked continuity by more than a thousand votes. That's checkable against the official count.
• 11:49
  Casey: The Tribune counted 3,182 ballots in Williams Lake, out of 8,333 registered voters. A small electorate makes every margin look like a verdict, and it also has fewer people who read the record.
• 12:02
  Riley: Voters in a city that size can walk up to a councillor and ask about a vote.
• 12:07
  Casey: They can ask. Whether they do is the question. Proximity makes the record personal. It doesn't make it public.
• 12:13
  Casey: Scott Nelson topped the council vote with 1,795 votes. He's also a respondent in a civil petition filed June 25th, 2025.
• 12:22
  Riley: An allegation, not a finding. The Chilliwack Progress reported that the petition alleges forged documents, misappropriated company assets and unaccounted proceeds, with up to $15 million not accounted for. Nelson's lawyer, Patrick Sullivan, called the allegations "fundamentally wrong" and "all speculation." Nelson denies them.
• 12:43
  Casey: The same article reports a consent order from early August 2025 restraining the transfer of assets. That's a court holding the money still while nobody has decided who is right. We haven't found a later ruling.
• 12:56
  Riley: A restraining order isn't a ruling. A voter who read the denial next to the petition, and still marked Nelson at the top, made that call with what was in front of them.
• 13:07
  Casey: How many Williams Lake voters read a Chilliwack paper in August 2025? Probably not many. So the vote ran on reputation and whatever circulated locally.
• 13:16
  Riley: Then the inherited part is the information environment itself. Williams Lake has one main paper, and its own staff member is on the ballot.
• 13:25
  Casey: The byline on that Progress story is Ruth Lloyd. Same name as the Tribune staff member who won a council seat this month, and her Tribune staff profile puts her on staff since 2021.
• 13:37
  Riley: Which is why we're saying it on air. A reporter who wins a council seat has a conflict. Naming it is the first step, and it's the one a voter can take.
• 13:45
  Casey: Naming it tells you who wrote the piece. It doesn't tell you who checked it.
• 13:50
  Riley: Then the disclosure is where the check starts. We're citing the Progress piece for the allegation and for nothing else.
• 13:57
  Casey: Three seats were filled without a vote: Steve Forseth in Area D, which is Fox Mountain and McLeese Lake, Maureen LeBourdais in Area F, which covers 150 Mile House, Horsefly and Likely, and Michael Franklin in School District 27's Trustee Area 6. Voters in those areas get no ballot for those seats. The Area E director race and the trustee races in Areas 4 and 5 were contested.
• 14:20
  Riley: An acclamation isn't a broken process. Nobody filed against them, and under the rules a filed name counts as the seat being filled.
• 14:28
  Casey: Nobody filed against them is true. It's also the whole check on those seats.
• 14:32
  Riley: Right. Then the check is the record. Forseth and LeBourdais are sitting directors, so their votes exist in the regional district's minutes, and a voter can ask for them.
• 14:43
  Casey: LeBourdais is named in a Tribune profile as having run in an Area F by-election. What that race returned is one of the things we haven't pinned down.
• 14:51
  Riley: Forbes is on two ballots, the Area E director race and the trustee race in Area 5, and both are real. She lost Area E to Melynda Neufeld, 180 votes to 163, and won the trustee seat over Nicole Berreth. Neufeld has been CRD vice-chair since November 2023, according to the Tribune. Forbes is a sitting trustee and board vice-chair. Same candidate, two results, two ballots.
• 15:16
  Casey: So the question for Area E isn't just who won. It's what Neufeld did between 2022 and now, and that's on the regional board's record, not on a yard sign.
• 15:26
  Riley: Now the council field. The sources name six winners: Nelson, Moses, Ryll, French, Lloyd and Wiebe. Ryll is the interesting one. He was a two-term councillor from 2014 to 2022, then ran for mayor in 2022 and finished second with 898 votes. Now he's back on council. A second-place mayoral finish that becomes a council seat is a record voters can read.
• 15:50
  Casey: Read it, then. He sat from 2014 to 2022, and the minutes from those eight years are the record. Ask what he voted for.
• 15:58
  Riley: French is the other return. He's a past president of the Williams Lake and District Chamber of Commerce, and he's back after eighteen years away. The chamber's board page is the kind of local record a voter can check against the council minutes.
• 16:13
  Casey: Eighteen years is a long gap. The question for French isn't whether he's known. It's what he'd do differently in the room.
• 16:21
  Riley: Moses was the NDP candidate in Cariboo-Chilcotin in 2024. Penticton Western News reported the count at 29.91 per cent for Moses and 70.09 per cent for Doerkson. He's been a Williams Lake councillor since 2022. Same person, two ballots, both sourced.
• 16:39
  Casey: A provincial loss tells you about a riding. It tells you very little about a council seat. Ask him what he did at the council table since 2022.
• 16:48
  Riley: Same test for the newcomers. Charlene Hays, Greg Jeannotte, Cianna O'Connor, Rafiullah Sahibzada, Billie Sheridan, Whitney Spearing, Nathan Wiebe and Kayla Zaruk were all named as political newcomers in the Tribune's September 12th story. A newcomer starts with no inherited trust. That's a clean slate.
• 17:07
  Casey: A clean slate isn't built trust. Built trust needs a record, and nobody on that list has one in today's sources.
• 17:13
  Casey: Sheila Boehm is on the council ballot too. She's a chiropractor and a two-term School District 27 trustee, per the Tribune's October 13th profile. Her council result isn't in today's sources.
• 17:25
  Riley: Jared Wardlaw-Gimbel withdrew by the September 18th deadline, so he's not on the ballot.
• 17:31
  Riley: The Lac La Hache arena is the cleanest trust test in today's material. The report landed on the 15th. The club closed the building on the 17th with a public notice. People could read the sign on the door before they read any engineering.
• 17:46
  Casey: Which is good practice. The repair bill is still unknown. Bev Fry says the club wants a full assessment. Nobody has said who pays for log columns.
• 17:54
  Riley: The club operates the building, so the decision sits with a volunteer organization. Nobody in the article is claiming otherwise.
• 18:01
  Casey: The building came with a history, and the club is holding the bill.
• 18:05
  Riley: Then the structural question is ownership and the paper trail. Who owns the building, and who gets to publish the Octo report?
• 18:12
  Casey: The people who can read it. A sealed report posted to a members' list isn't a public record.
• 18:18
  Riley: The report could be posted on the club's notice board, and that alone is a higher standard than most municipal decisions meet.
• 18:24
  Casey: Only if someone reads it out loud at the next meeting.
• 18:27
  Riley: Wells is the small-town version of the same question. Jillian Merrick won the mayor's chair with 85 votes, and a council with three new faces in a town that small has no room to hide a bad vote.
• 18:40
  Casey: Or nobody needs to look, because everybody already knows everybody. That's familiarity, and it cuts both ways.
• 18:46
  Riley: Familiarity is how a voter notices a broken promise. The trust comes from being able to see the result on the street.
• 18:54
  Casey: The promise you can see on the street is the one you can forgive. The record that's on paper is the one you can prove.
• 19:01
  Riley: Then test both. The province matters too, since voters in Cariboo-Chilcotin and Prince George-North Cariboo are choosing today.
• 19:09
  Casey: Doerkson was first elected as a B.C. Liberal in 2020, then re-elected in 2024 as a B.C. Conservative. Global News says he was elected with BC United in 2020, so the party label differs across outlets. Voters can put that switch to him directly.
• 19:25
  Riley: He won the 2024 race by 7,722 votes, according to bcballot.ca. A margin that large means the seat is predictable, and a predictable seat is one where the record gets read least.
• 19:38
  Casey: Which is why I'd rather see a contested seat than a comfortable one. Bardua and Thompson are on the ballot in the north. Clare's own statement says he taught at CNC since 1993, served as House Leader and Environment critic, and sponsored private member's bill M237. Those are his words, and they're a starting point for the minutes.
• 19:57
  Riley: The Times Colonist reported in January that Clare was running for B.C. Conservative leadership, and the outcome of that bid isn't in today's sources. Thompson finished fourth in 2024 with 4.3 per cent and is running again. Same standard for every party, and every name on the list.
• 20:15
  Casey: Same standard, and the standard is the record. Not the poll, not the margin, and not the endorsement.
• 20:21
  Riley: Right. And the record is the one piece of this we can make the voter responsible for.
• 20:26
  Casey: The voter is one part. The city is the other. If council votes are minuted and posted where a resident can read them, the trust lives in a document. If they aren't, it lives in whoever remembers the vote.
• 20:38
  Riley: So pick one council vote from this term, read the minutes if the city posts them, and compare the vote with what the candidate said on the campaign trail. If the minutes aren't posted, that's a finding too, and the city can change it at the next meeting.
• 20:54
  Casey: And check whether the vote was recorded at all before you trust the pamphlet. If you've got a story tip or a vote you want traced, write to feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a. Hope you're having a good weekend.
• 21:06
  Riley: Read the minutes before you trust the pamphlet. Talk to you next time.