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Cariboo Local Affairs · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Riley: Hey, welcome back. Today it's a Williams Lake mayoral rematch with a documented 2021 controversy attached, a council race with fourteen names but eleven blank records, and three CRD electoral seats where we couldn't find a filed candidate anywhere. Three weeks to the vote, and we're asking what happens when nobody writes a place down. That's coming right up.
• 0:36
  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, September twenty-sixth, twenty twenty-six. Coming to you from the Cariboo, on lands that have been cared for by the Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in, and Dakelh peoples since time immemorial. Today's theme is Cariboo Local Affairs.
• 1:00
  Casey: And I'm Casey. With three weeks left before Williams Lake and the surrounding electoral areas vote, today's about who's actually on that ballot — and who isn't.
• 1:09
  Riley: Quick weather sweep before we get into it. Out at Horsefly Lake this morning, light drizzle, around 5 degrees, with a high of 10 later. Moderate drizzle through the day, about a 75 percent chance of rain, four millimetres or so.
• 1:24
  Casey: Round the rest of the region — 100 Mile House sitting at 3 with light drizzle, Williams Lake around 5, also drizzle, Quesnel a touch warmer at 6, and Tatla Lake the outlier at 2 degrees but mainly clear. Grab a jacket.
• 1:38
  Riley: Let's get into what's happening on the ground.
• 1:41
  Riley: A lot of today's news is close to home, starting in Williams Lake, where the Union of BC Municipalities has backed the city's push for more dead wood salvage and faster permitting on it. The request traces back to 2018, when Williams Lake First Nation and the city first flagged the amount of beetle-killed and fire-damaged timber sitting unharvested around the community — standing fuel that adds risk every wildfire season it isn't cleared. UBCM's resolution puts the weight of the whole municipal association behind the ask, but the actual permitting authority sits with the province, and this is a request the city has been renewing for close to a decade.
• 2:23
  Casey: Eight years of asking for the same permit reform is its own kind of data point. That's a backlog, not urgency.
• 2:30
  Casey: From the forest to the rink — the Williams Lake Stampeders are out for the 2026-27 CIHL season. The club announced it on September twenty-fourth, citing a shortage of players and a lack of sponsorship support after holding tryouts earlier in the month. They posted a thank-you to fans rather than a roster or a schedule.
• 2:50
  Riley: A junior club going dark costs a town more than hockey — billet families, concession shifts, Friday nights with somewhere to be.
• 2:59
  Riley: Staying in Williams Lake, the Tribune ran a feature this week on Manpreet Singh, who moved from India and has built a life in the city over what the piece frames as years of balancing two worlds — family ties back home, a career and a household here. It's a profile, not a policy story, but it's the kind of piece that reminds you who's actually filling out the Cariboo Regional District's population numbers we quote every week.
• 3:26
  Casey: Over in Quesnel, the Thanksgiving Food Drive is underway for the Nourish Food Bank. Organizer Rachel Pontius says volunteers have already dropped bags at houses along roughly forty routes across the city, with pickup to follow in the coming days — the classic two-step drive, where residents fill the bag left on their porch and set it back out for collection.
• 3:48
  Riley: Forty routes is a lot of doorsteps for a city Quesnel's size. That's no small ask of volunteers.
• 3:55
  Riley: And CN Police are reminding Quesnel residents to stay off the railway tracks. Trespassing on rail property is illegal as well as dangerous, and the reminder from media relations manager Jonathan Abecassis comes as days get shorter and visibility along the tracks drops earlier in the afternoon.
• 4:14
  Casey: That warning's less about news and more about somebody almost getting hit. Repeat it anyway.
• 4:19
  Casey: A different kind of safety question now, and this one lands outside our jurisdiction — a US policy story, not one Cariboo voters have any say over. The FDA approved a new flu vaccine called mFlusiva back on August fifth, an mRNA influenza shot that tested well in older adults. The CDC has declined to add it to its recommended list for this flu season, citing legal uncertainties and inquiries.
• 4:43
  Riley: Approval and recommendation aren't the same regulatory step — a distinction that shows up here too, any time a provincial ministry signs off on something and a health authority still has to decide how hard to push it into clinics.
• 4:58
  Riley: Sticking with politics and money — Business Insider looked at a wave of political attack ads going after AI and data centres, and the throughline across all of them is electricity bills. Not job losses, not safety concerns. Cost, stated plainly, in campaign spot after campaign spot.
• 5:17
  Casey: Nobody in the Cariboo's fighting off a data centre bid this week, but who pays for power infrastructure isn't a big-market question. BC Hydro rate increases land here the same as anywhere.
• 5:29
  Casey: On AI and infrastructure of a friendlier kind — the FAA is rolling out a scheduling tool called SMART at Washington-area airports, crunching weather and scheduling data to predict and avoid delays before they cascade. Three major airports in that region.
• 5:45
  Riley: Nothing wrong with borrowing good ideas. I wouldn't hold my breath for it at the Williams Lake airstrip.
• 5:53
  Riley: Vancouver's got its own municipal race heating up — the Vancouver Sun has been running interviews with the top mayoral candidates as a series, this week featuring Kareem Allam of the Vancouver Liberals.
• 6:06
  Casey: Different city, same season. Everybody's got a ballot this fall; ours just happens to have four races stacked on it instead of one.
• 6:14
  Casey: Scientific American has a story on something astronomers are calling the Milky Way's first microblazar — a compact object throwing off jets of energetic particles that had been sitting there, in our own galaxy, unnoticed until someone pointed the right instrument at the right patch of sky.
• 6:30
  Riley: Hiding in plain sight. That may be the theme of the week.
• 6:34
  Riley: Popular Mechanics has a piece on a megadrought that's now stretched twenty-seven years across parts of the western United States. Scientists studying it think the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the natural wet-dry cycle that used to regulate the region on a predictable rhythm, may have been knocked permanently off pattern by climate change.
• 6:56
  Casey: Twenty-seven years stops being a dry spell. That's a generation growing up without remembering what a wet decade looks like.
• 7:04
  Casey: ZDNet ran a piece breaking down whether solar actually pencils out for a given household, and the honest answer is it depends on three things — where you live, how you finance the install, and whether you can store what you generate.
• 7:18
  Riley: Hackaday's security roundup this week covers a lot of ground. The ShinyHunters group reportedly used a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft to break into the FBI's own jobs website and pull data out of AWS GovCloud instances. Separately, there's a warning about a tool called Muse being vulnerable to a clickjacking-style scam called ClickFix, and new attacks demonstrated against RSA encryption.
• 7:45
  Casey: If the FBI's job site can get popped through a vendor flaw, nobody gets to feel smug about their own password habits.
• 7:52
  Casey: In mining, The Northern Miner reports uranium producers racing to keep pace with a resurgence in global nuclear demand. Exploration and development spending on uranium topped one point seven-eight billion dollars worldwide in 2023, as the market slides into what the piece calls a structural supply deficit.
• 8:11
  Riley: Nuclear's having a moment most people aren't tracking. I'd watch whether any of that investment interest looks north into BC.
• 8:20
  Riley: We'll close with one from the workbench. Hackaday has a writeup on a hobbyist who used a Raspberry Pi Pico to recreate the old Heathkit HK-21 pocket packet radio — the handheld terminal ham operators used decades ago to send data over the airwaves, long before anyone outside a university lab had heard of the internet.
• 8:41
  Casey: Rebuilding forty-year-old data radio gear with a chip that costs less than lunch. The idea outlasts the hardware every time.
• 8:49
  Riley: It does. And on that note, let's turn to an organization doing steady, unglamorous work of its own.
• 8:56
  Casey: Today's spotlight is on CMHA South Cariboo, running free mental health programs out of 100 Mile House and reaching communities from Clinton to Lac La Hache. They've got a community navigator to help people find the right service without having to already know the system, suicide intervention training open to anyone who wants it, life skills programming, and housing support for people trying to get stable footing. None of it costs a thing to access, and none of it requires you to already know where to start looking.
• 9:26
  Riley: That's the kind of infrastructure that doesn't make headlines until it's gone. Glad it's there, and glad it reaches the smaller communities around 100 Mile, not just the town itself.
• 9:36
  Casey: You can find them at southcariboo dot cmha dot bc dot ca. And speaking of what does and doesn't get noticed — that's where we're headed next.
• 9:45
  Casey: There's a piece making the rounds this week where a political scientist argues that BC's overlapping provincial and municipal election calendar is bad for democracy. His actual complaint is about local media capacity — that coverage of municipal races was already thin before you added a provincial campaign competing for the same reporters, the same airtime, the same reader attention span.
• 10:08
  Riley: Which puts a sharper version of it on our own ballot. Four races here. Mayor, council, a CRD director seat, a school trustee seat. Does a place still exist in any public sense if nobody bothers to write down who's asking to govern it? Let's see how the four hold up against that.
• 10:25
  Casey: Start with the one that has a paper trail. Williams Lake's mayoral race is Surinderpal Rathor against Walt Cobb. That's a rematch, not a fresh contest.
• 10:34
  Riley: Rathor unseated Cobb in 2022 — thirty-four point one percent of the vote, with then-councillor Jason Ryll second at twenty-eight point one and Cobb third. And Rathor didn't arrive out of nowhere. Seven consecutive terms on council starting in 1993, about twenty-one years, before he ever ran for the top job.
• 10:54
  Casey: So the fresh-leadership framing, if anybody reaches for it, collides with roughly three decades in local politics. And Cobb's record has a documented complication that doesn't get to sit out of this. He was mayor from 2014 until that 2022 loss, and in late 2021, while still in office, he shared a Facebook post from his personal account containing misinformation about residential schools. Williams Lake First Nation publicly called for his resignation.
• 11:22
  Riley: He apologized. He also reportedly said at the time that he was annoyed WLFN had made the issue public. He didn't resign, and he ran again the following year.
• 11:31
  Casey: That's an event with a date and a public apology attached, not a rumour circulating in a comment section. It happened roughly a year before he lost to Rathor.
• 11:40
  Riley: The sources in front of us don't draw a causal line from the controversy to the loss, and neither should we. But the fact pattern is on the record, and a voter choosing between these two in three weeks is entitled to all of it — Cobb's term as MLA for Cariboo South from 2001 to 2005, his eight years as mayor, and that episode late in the term.
• 12:02
  Casey: Four years and an apology. Whether that's enough is a voter's call, not ours. I'd add the reverse limit too: nothing in what we searched reports any in-term controversy for Rathor as mayor either. His side of the ledger is thin in the other direction — long service, little scrutiny published.
• 12:19
  Riley: Ryll's the footnote sitting inside all of this. He lost the mayoral race in 2022, and this cycle he's filed for council rather than trying again for the chain of office.
• 12:30
  Casey: A rung down, or a clear-eyed read of where his support actually sits. Nobody's on record explaining it, so we're not guessing at motive.
• 12:38
  Riley: Council is a different kind of gap. Fourteen names filed this cycle. The list originally had fifteen; one candidate withdrew after nominations closed, and we haven't been able to confirm which name came off. So fourteen running — and we're not reading out fifteen names as if everyone's still in it.
• 12:57
  Casey: Of those fourteen, three already hold seats. Sheila Boehm, Michael Moses, Scott Nelson. Nelson's the longest-serving — twenty years on council altogether, plus three years as mayor before that. Boehm's a registered nurse going for her second term, and she's spoken publicly about School District 27 governance, including encouraging engagement with a letter from a group calling itself Concerned Parents of Williams Lake. Moses came in new in 2022 — his background includes work with the Canadian Mental Health Association board and the Cariboo Friendship Society — and he's seeking a second term.
• 13:31
  Riley: The honest limit on all three: no source in front of us reports a specific vote, a budget position, or an in-term controversy for any of them this cycle. Biography and 2022 results, that's the file.
• 13:43
  Casey: Which makes the renewal-versus-experience framing hard to actually apply. You can compare Nelson's twenty years to Moses's four, but you can't compare what they did with them. Nobody wrote it down.
• 13:54
  Riley: The other eleven names — Paul French, Ruth Lloyd, Whitney Spearing, Greg Jeannotte, Rafiullah Sahibzada, Charlene Hays, Cianna O'Connor, Billie Sheridan, Jared Wardlaw-Gimbel, Nathan Wiebe, and Kayla Zaruk — we found nothing. No prior office, no election history, no controversy, no biography beyond a name on a nomination form.
• 14:14
  Casey: Eleven blank pages in a city this size. That's not a knock on any of them personally. It may just mean they're first-time candidates who haven't had the chance to generate a public record.
• 14:25
  Riley: Or nobody's been assigned to go find out who they are before ballots get cast. Which is the overlapping-election argument arriving on our doorstep — thin newsroom capacity plus a simultaneous provincial campaign, producing gaps in real time.
• 14:40
  Casey: And then it stops being a media-capacity abstraction and becomes an accountability hole. The CRD electoral area director seats — Areas D, E, and F, the ones ringing Williams Lake, covering McLeese Lake, Dog Creek, South Lakeside, 150 Mile House, Horsefly, and Likely — we don't have a filed candidate list for any of them. Not a partial list. None.
• 15:00
  Riley: Saying that plainly once is better than treating it as a mystery to speculate through on air. The show doesn't have those candidates.
• 15:08
  Casey: What we do have is who holds the seats now, from the CRD's own website. Area D's director is Steve Forseth. Area E is Melynda Neufeld, who also serves as CRD vice-chair. Area F's current director we could not confirm at all — that page didn't surface a name in anything we searched.
• 15:25
  Riley: Those three seats decide land use and budget authority across a huge stretch outside the city limits — Horsefly included, which happens to be where this show is produced from. We cannot tell our own neighbours who's running for it.
• 15:39
  Casey: Which is a little embarrassing for a program that opens every morning with the Horsefly Lake forecast down to the millimetre.
• 15:46
  Riley: Four millimetres of drizzle we can source. A director's name, apparently not.
• 15:50
  Casey: Those seats are real. The votes cast there in three weeks will be real. The candidate list, as far as this show can establish today, isn't findable anywhere we looked.
• 16:00
  Riley: And the kind of gap matters. The information almost certainly exists — a nomination form got filed with the CRD returning officer, on paper, in an office, before the deadline. It hasn't made its way into anything a resident of Area F can read without already knowing which government line to call.
• 16:18
  Casey: That's a worse failure than unrecorded. It's recorded and unfindable, and it can pass at a glance for transparency. Somewhere there's a database with the answer, and a voter in Likely still can't reach it without making a phone call the CRD should have made unnecessary.
• 16:34
  Riley: The trustee race shows what a fully documented, low-drama seat looks like on the same ballot. Zone 6, the City of Williams Lake seat, has one name filed. Michael Franklin, the sitting trustee, running for another term.
• 16:48
  Casey: So Zone 6 voters get no contest for that seat. Acclamation, full stop, and the honest move is to say so rather than manufacture a race.
• 16:56
  Riley: Franklin's on the record from a contentious SD27 board meeting in June of 2024, sitting alongside trustees Willow Macdonald, Ciel Patenaude, Anne Kohut, and Linda Martens. Patenaude later resigned, which triggered a by-election in Electoral Area 4 — covering Areas F and D — that Melissa Coates contested in early 2025.
• 17:17
  Casey: The board's had real turnover mid-term, then. Just not in Zone 6. Franklin's the incumbent, he's unopposed, and that's what the filed list says. No conspiracy required — fourteen people filed across all the SD27 zones, and none of them wanted this one.
• 17:32
  Riley: Sometimes a seat is quiet because nobody else wanted the job, not because anyone's hiding it.
• 17:37
  Casey: So: four very different ballots stapled under one election date. A rematch with documented history on both sides. Fourteen council names, three with partial records and eleven blank. Three CRD seats with no filed list at all, in territory this show physically sits inside. And one name running unopposed on a board that's seen turmoil elsewhere.
• 17:57
  Riley: That's four distinct relationships between a public seat and the record of who's asking for it, not one story in four costumes.
• 18:05
  Casey: And the overlapping-election pressure hits them unevenly. The mayoral race gets covered regardless — rematch, documented controversy, an obvious hook for any reporter with an afternoon. The CRD seats don't get that by default. Nobody assigns a story to a name that doesn't exist yet in public.
• 18:22
  Riley: Fixable, though. The Regional District already publishes incumbent director pages — cariboord.ca has Forseth and Neufeld listed plainly. If a 2026 candidate list for Areas D, E, and F sits in a returning officer's office, putting it where residents will trip over it is a web page, not a budget line.
• 18:41
  Casey: And local outlets treating that list as worth chasing even without rematch drama to carry the headline. That's the part I'm less confident about, because attention follows conflict, and an acclaimed trustee and three unlisted rural seats offer none.
• 18:56
  Riley: Then let's close the loop the only way we can. If you're out in Area F and you know who's running — or even the current director's name — send it to feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a, and we'll read it onto the record before the vote. Three weeks is enough time for a place to get written down properly. Enjoy the weekend, wherever the drizzle finds you.
• 19:18
  Casey: I'd rather be proven wrong by an inbox than right by silence. Vote for whichever names you can actually find.