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Working Lands And Industry · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Riley: Hey, welcome in. On today's episode: a hundred and seventy billion dollars in data center projects stalled by community pushback, and what that number actually counts. Plus, a $1 billion Food-Link Fund from Ottawa, and the Deep Dive question: when we measure forests, farms and ranches, what are we really counting? That and more, coming right up.
• 0:34
  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 Tuesday, October 6th, 2026. Today's theme is Working Lands & Industry. Reaching you from the heart of the Cariboo, the homeland of the Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in, and Dakelh nations.
• 0:55
  Casey: And I'm Casey. Today we're looking at the places where land turns into a paycheque, and how anyone keeps score. Out at Horsefly Lake it's overcast and about 7 this morning, with a high of 16, a low of 6 and a 2 percent chance of precipitation. 100 Mile House and Williams Lake are both around 6 and partly cloudy, Quesnel is 7 and overcast, and Tatla Lake is around 4, partly cloudy.
• 1:19
  Riley: Layers, then. On to the news.
• 1:22
  Casey: A lot of today's news sits close to home, mostly the campaign trail and a few Quesnel items, so we'll start there.
• 1:29
  Riley: The Quesnel Cariboo Observer's Meet the Candidates series now has Tony Goulet, who is seeking re-election as a city councillor. General voting day across B.C., Quesnel included, is October 17th, according to the Observer.
• 1:44
  Casey: On the provincial side, My Cariboo Now reports a new poll with the B.C. Conservatives holding a five-point lead over the NDP as voters firm up their choices. The report we have doesn't name the polling firm or the sample size. A five-point lead is a snapshot of who's answering the phone today. It's not a forecast.
• 2:03
  Riley: The Williams Lake Tribune reports that Quesnel Writer's Day is back for a fourth year with free workshops. It's hosted by the Quesnel Writer's Group, and last event's contest winners were pictured with their certificates.
• 2:16
  Casey: Four years is a track record for a small-city literary event.
• 2:20
  Riley: Back to the provincial race. The B.C. NDP is promising to restart seven paused long-term care projects if re-elected, and to expand health-care supports for seniors. My Cariboo Now carried the pledge today. The report we have doesn't say which communities the seven projects are in, so we can't say whether any touch the Cariboo. For a region with long drives to care, that's the detail a voter would want first.
• 2:47
  Casey: On health care closer to us, the Tribune reports that Conservative interim leader Lorne Doerkson pledged a $50 million fund to address emergency room closures. Doerkson is also the incumbent in Cariboo-Chilcotin. Elections BC results show he's held the seat since 2020, first elected as a B.C. Liberal and re-elected in 2024 as a B.C. Conservative. BC Ballot, citing Elections BC, gives his 2024 result as 13,714 votes, about 69.6 percent, against the NDP's Michael Moses.
• 3:19
  Riley: His NDP challenger this time is Kathryn Askew, a retired school teacher from Canim Lake. The 100 Mile Free Press reported last week that she spent 32 years in education, held local union leadership roles with the BC Teachers' Federation, and volunteers with the Hawkins Lake Volunteer Fire Department and the Forest Grove Legion.
• 3:41
  Casey: The B.C. Greens are proposing new taxes on extreme wealth, as parties sharpen their pitch to high-income earners. My Cariboo Now has the headline but not the rates or the thresholds. The Green candidate in Cariboo-Chilcotin is Douglas Gook. BC Ballot lists five previous runs for him. In Prince George-North Cariboo, which includes Quesnel, the Greens have Randy Thompson, who ran in 2024 and finished fourth with 866 votes, according to BC Ballot.
• 4:08
  Riley: That riding's incumbent is Conservative Sheldon Clare, who won it in 2024 with 11,430 votes, per BC Ballot's account of the Elections BC numbers. The NDP's Denice Bardua, who finished third in 2024, is running again. Their records beyond that aren't in today's sources.
• 4:28
  Casey: ​Ottawa announced an upcoming $1 billion Food-Link Fund, part of the National Food Security Strategy. Agriculture Minister Heath MacDonald and Housing and Infrastructure Minister Gregor Robertson say it will support infrastructure to move food more efficiently, including food terminals and local food hubs. What it will cost a producer in a place like ours to get onto a terminal's loading dock isn't in the release.
• 4:53
  Riley: On the mining side, the World Bank Group is backing a $1.4 billion financing structure for Chile's state-owned copper company Codelco. It's holding the structure up as a model for mineral-rich countries trying to attract long-term private capital while reducing the risk that comes with mining. The Northern Miner reports it.
• 5:13
  Casey: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has confirmed its Seed Increase Unit will run out of both Indian Head and Saskatoon in 2027, then move fully to Saskatoon in 2028. RealAgriculture says that's meant to be an orderly transition over two seasons.
• 5:30
  Riley: ZDNet reports that companies are ditching the cloud to save millions. Enterprise leaders say more of them are pulling workloads back off cloud services. The piece we have doesn't tell us what any individual company saved.
• 5:45
  Casey: TechCrunch reports hackers stole records on 8 million people from a Danish government database. Names, addresses and state-issued ID numbers, including people living abroad and people who've died.
• 5:57
  Riley: Noah Smith's Roundup number 89 touches on AI risk, reindustrialization, the rent crisis, AI and jobs, mass deportation, Chinese investment and cyber risk. The reindustrialization thread is the one a resource region watches closely.
• 6:13
  Casey: The Verge has a long piece on AI's takeover of mathematics. OpenAI, Anthropic and other labs have announced breakthroughs on long-standing problems this past year, in some cases beyond what researchers expected. Anthropic's Claude writes and curates this show, so we're not neutral on that one.
• 6:30
  Riley: Canadian miner Millennial Potash is moving toward 2029 production at its US-backed project in Gabon. Mining.com quotes the CEO: "I don't want to replace Canadian potash. Actually, I want to replace Russian potash."
• 6:45
  Casey: Hackaday has a build about a cheap, dexterous robot hand. The writeup is about making one that doesn't cost what commercial ones do.
• 6:54
  Riley: Price is what keeps this stuff away from small operations. A cheap hand a hobbyist can build is how you find out what works before anyone builds a business on it.
• 7:04
  Casey: From machines that can't quite pick things up to a group that picks up other people's leftovers, on to the Spotlight.
• 7:11
  Casey: It's World Habitat Day, so a word about Habitat for Humanity Cariboo. They build affordable homes for Cariboo families in need, and their ReStore keeps building materials out of the landfill while the sales fund housing projects. You can volunteer at habitatcariboo.org.
• 7:27
  Riley: A hardware store that funds houses is a good loop. Donating a spare door counts as civic participation.
• 7:34
  Casey: Housing and land are the same argument, really. Who gets to build, and what are we counting when we say it went well?
• 7:41
  Riley: A hundred and seventy billion dollars. Fast Company says that's what was at stake in 46 proposed AI data center projects across 20 states, between January 2024 and May 2026, blocked, withdrawn or stalled after community opposition. Massachusetts governor Maura Healey says "Unless a community says yes to a data center, we are saying no." Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro took it a step further on early engagement with residents.
• 8:09
  Casey: What is that number measuring?
• 8:11
  Riley: Capital that walked away from places that didn't want it.
• 8:14
  Casey: Capital that was announced. The figure comes from a Carbon Direct white paper, and Carbon Direct is an energy and climate solutions company. KuCoin's summary of it gives a range of 137 to 172 billion. An earlier Data Center Watch tally came in at 64 billion, 18 blocked and 46 delayed. Same fight, a spread of more than a hundred billion depending on who's counting. And "announced investment" is a press-release number. Nobody lost that money. Nobody spent it either.
• 8:43
  Riley: Take the lowest number. Sixty-four billion in stalled and blocked projects is still a pattern. Developers who skip the community step pay for it in delay, and delay is what lenders price. The projects that survive are the ones where consent was designed in early, and the energy and ratepayer terms are written into the deal. As reported, Healey's order applies to sites over 25 megawatts, requires a state-standardized community benefits agreement, makes developers bring their own clean energy or pay into a ratepayer protection fund, and bans NDAs. That's a bankability argument as much as a democratic one.
• 9:22
  Casey: Mind the source on that. The order details come from a search summary we couldn't independently confirm, so treat them as reported. And the white paper lumps "stalled" in with "blocked." A project that's six months late and a project that's dead land in the same total. Whoever built the number wanted it big.
• 9:39
  Riley: Stalled is a cost too. The delay was the price of ignoring the town.
• 9:43
  Casey: Sometimes. Sometimes it's an interconnection queue. You can't tell from the total.
• 9:48
  Riley: The total is blunt, yes.
• 9:50
  Casey: The whole frame is a working-lands question. If Massachusetts says no, the project doesn't evaporate. It goes looking for cheaper land, cheap power and less leverage. Which means a small rural town.
• 10:01
  Riley: Same rules protect the small town. A standardized community benefits agreement means the town doesn't negotiate from scratch against a developer's legal team. The NDA ban matters most there, because secrecy is what a small council can't afford. And Shapiro's version is softer, early and transparent engagement so residents can influence major design decisions. That's a floor a small town can point to.
• 10:26
  Casey: A floor with no veto in it. Engagement is what you call it when the decision was already half made. A council in a town the size of 100 Mile House gets a pitch deck and a deadline. "Community says yes" depends on who counts as the community, who explained the terms, and who's still around when the contract comes due. The yes can be a better-packaged benefits deal.
• 10:48
  Riley: Sometimes it is. The alternative is no process at all.
• 10:51
  Casey: I'm not defending no process. Consent is hard to measure, so we measure the vote, and then the vote becomes the goal.
• 10:57
  Riley: Then publish the terms next to the vote.
• 11:00
  Casey: That would help. It still doesn't tell you whether the town was ready.
• 11:04
  Riley: Take the proxy question to forestry, the region's oldest number. Allowable annual cut, and cubic metres harvested. A hard cap on volume is auditable and enforceable, and the proxy has a clear job: keep harvest within what the forest can sustain.
• 11:20
  Casey: And mills keep closing while the volumes are being met. Cubic metres don't carry fibre quality. A cubic metre of sound sawlog and a cubic metre of beetle-killed pulp-grade stems are one cubic metre each on the ledger. They don't carry how many people it took to process, or who held the jobs. The cut volume was supposed to stand in for a healthy forest and a healthy industry. Somewhere along the way it became the thing everyone reports against, and the forest and the town fell out of the report.
• 11:48
  Riley: The tools to measure more exist. Inventory from remote sensing, grading at the mill. I can't point to a Cariboo deployment that puts fibre grade and jobs per thousand cubic metres next to the volume, and that's the gap. But the cap itself did something. It's the one number that forces a limit.
• 12:07
  Casey: A limit on volume, not on what the volume was worth. Whoever picks the second number picks the winner. A mill wants grade. A town wants jobs. A Nation wants the forest in shape in a hundred years. All three are real. None of them is the cut.
• 12:20
  Riley: Then you need all three on the page.
• 12:22
  Casey: Sure. Who writes the page?
• 12:24
  Riley: The province, with the Nations in the room.
• 12:27
  Casey: Mm-hm. That's a governance fight, not a data problem.
• 12:30
  Riley: The region has run that fight before. Williams Lake and Quesnel both grew up around mills, and the way those towns talk about a good year is still the tally of trucks and shifts. When a mill curtails, the cut volume on paper can hold steady for a season because the licence holder is harvesting elsewhere or moving wood to a plant down the road. The number says fine. The payroll in town says otherwise.
• 12:55
  Casey: The volume was meant to describe the forest's capacity. It ends up describing a company's logistics. Nothing in it tells a Quesnel household whether the job stays.
• 13:04
  Riley: Then jobs per thousand cubic metres is the first add. It's cheap to compute if the licensee reports hours.
• 13:11
  Casey: If. Licensees report what they're required to report. Ask them for payroll by community and you'll hear about commercial confidentiality.
• 13:19
  Riley: Agriculture shows it from the vendor side. Farmonaut published a piece arguing the future of sustainable farming is "forged in factories." The satellite shots, automated tractors and soil moisture sensors all depend on a manufacturing supply chain, and keeping those plants running through professional IT support is described as the thing that locks down predictability.
• 13:42
  Casey: Read that for the metric. The measure of sustainable farming in that piece is the uptime of the factory that builds the sensor. We went from soil health, to a soil-moisture reading, to the reliability of the plant that made the reading device. That's a vendor writing about its own customers' needs, so I'm treating it as marketing. The part we read has no yield, no income, no farm in it.
• 14:05
  Riley: The sensors do measure real things. Soil moisture is soil moisture. A rancher irrigating a hay field who knows which quarter is dry saves water and diesel.
• 14:14
  Casey: And somebody still owns the sensor, the platform and the subscription. You've measured the field and handed the measurement to a supplier. Who captures the value?
• 14:24
  Riley: The grower captures the water savings. The supplier captures the subscription. Same split as any tool.
• 14:30
  Casey: Except the price climbs if the supplier controls the data. The proxy walks away from the field.
• 14:36
  Riley: Then the grower should demand the raw reading in a format they can take elsewhere.
• 14:41
  Casey: That's a contract term. Good. Most growers don't read the contract.
• 14:45
  Riley: Ottawa's new Food-Link Fund has the same issue on the other end. A billion dollars for terminals and hubs gets measured in tonnes moved and facilities built. Whether a Cariboo beef or hay producer sees a better price is a separate question, and the release doesn't answer it.
• 15:01
  Casey: Tonnes moved is a throughput number. It can rise while the producer's margin shrinks. Everyone in the chain reports success.
• 15:09
  Riley: Tourism is the part of the working-lands economy that gets measured worst. The Tribune reports options are being considered for B.C.'s Historic O'Keefe Ranch. It's a heritage ranch in the Okanagan, south and east of the Cariboo, but it's the same business problem a guest ranch or guiding outfit here has. You turn a landscape and a way of life into something people pay to visit. We don't have the full list of options in what we read.
• 15:36
  Casey: And a heritage ranch's headline number is visitors. Visits tell you the gate is open. They don't tell you whether the ranch pays for its roof, who the volunteers are, or whether the cattle are still part of the operation or just part of the photo. Here, guest ranches and outfitters live on bookings, and bookings follow a landscape that has to stay working. If the cow-calf operations around Williams Lake can't carry themselves, the guest ranch is a ranch-themed hotel.
• 16:03
  Riley: Which is an argument for tourism revenue helping hold working land together. A guest ranch that earns off the view can afford to keep the herd.
• 16:12
  Casey: Or the view becomes the product and the herd becomes scenery. Bookings can climb while the thing people booked for shrinks, and nothing on the dashboard would flag it.
• 16:22
  Riley: So pair bookings with repeat guests, local hires, acres still in production.
• 16:26
  Casey: Now you're building a ledger. Somebody has to maintain it in year five.
• 16:30
  Riley: Operators already track repeat guests. That's cheap, and it's theirs.
• 16:34
  Casey: Right, that one belongs to them.
• 16:36
  Riley: The Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in and Dakelh nations already measure land in terms that don't reduce to a volume. A Nation-led forestry operation can put stewardship in the contract, and written into permits beats left to goodwill. Williams Lake First Nation is the kind of Cariboo partner a licence could be tied to. It's the same answer as the data centre fight: terms attached to the deal, not to the mood.
• 17:00
  Casey: Tied to the permit and the Nation, and not to a shareholder. I'll accept that structure. Measurement alone doesn't fix drift, though. Once a number runs the budget, people optimize for it.
• 17:10
  Riley: Then you change the number.
• 17:12
  Casey: And lobbyists argue about the new number. Still, the old one stays too narrow.
• 17:16
  Riley: That's the best case for publishing three numbers instead of one.
• 17:20
  Casey: The smallest experiment I'd try is one question at the all-candidates forums in Cariboo-Chilcotin and Prince George-North Cariboo, put to every candidate on the ballot the same way. When the cut volume gets reported, what number goes next to it? Jobs per thousand cubic metres, grade of fibre, something. Then listen to who answers and who changes the subject.
• 17:41
  Riley: Add a version for tourism. Ask any ranch or outfitter in the region what they'd put beside their booking count, and see whether the answers match.
• 17:50
  Casey: They won't match. That's the information.
• 17:52
  Riley: A better number still changes what people do, and if you've got one from your own operation that hides more than it shows, write to us at feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a. Tell us what it was supposed to measure.
• 18:05
  Casey: I think it changes what they report, and we can't settle that today. Go count something that matters.