RADIO FREE KASLO, February 13, 2026

[Music] Hey everyone, welcome to Radio Free Caslow coming at you from the true North, strong and free from the very heart of Alpine Irvana, beautiful downtown, Caslow, British Columbia, Canada. My name's Randy Morse, thanks so much for joining me today. As always, this show was coming to you courtesy of the mothership at Coutney Co-op Radio. Found at 96.5 FM on your dials right here in Caslow and across the lake in Crawford Bay, at 93.5 FM down in Nelson, at 1.5 FM in the Lower Slowcam Valley, and at 107.5 FM in New Denver and Silverton. On today's show, I am going to sit down and have a slightly frigid because we were outside yesterday evening, and I got a little chilly overlooking the Moe Beach down at the bay here in Caslow, with Tyler Dobby. Tyler lived in Caslow as a child when his mom was the public health nurse for the Coutney Co-op Radio, and his dad was an architect and carpenter. The family left Caslow in 1987, and Tyler spent his adolescence in Ottawa before returning to the Coutney's back in 2001. He worked as a technician at Net Idea Nelson for a year, and then moved back to Caslow in 2003. Three years later, his partner took over a store called Coutney Lake Computers, where I used to do all of my technology shopping right on Front Street, which he ran with his spouse Nicole for five years, then Nicole took it over and rounded herself for another five. Well, he went to work for Caslow Infonet or Kin. Over the years, and this is really the reason why I reached out to Tyler today, he staged some protests when Caslow lost its 24/7 ER, and sat on the Health Select Committee of the Village of Caslow for a couple of years, helping efforts to recruit rural doctors to this village. Tyler joined the board of the Victorian Hospital of Caslow Auxiliary Society in 2024, and he's been successful in getting attention to the need for expanded long-term care at the Victorian Community Health Center here in Caslow, highlighting the disparity between rural and urban health services in BC, and that's what I wanted to sit down and talk with Tyler about, and so we did, and here's that conversation right now. Right here, on Radio Free Caslow, where health matters. Tyler, good to see you, man, and, yeah, remind me, why are we sitting at a picnic bench overlooking a moi beach late on a Thursday afternoon or early on a Thursday evening, other than the fact that the view is startlingly beautiful. Well, that's the primary reason, of course, is to enjoy the Alpine Glow with these mountains with their snow tops, but we're also going to talk about the work I've been doing with the Hospital Auxiliary to basically get attention from interior health and the government on the need for an expansion to our long-term care, and then to rope it into a larger health center, get as much as we can out of that. Okay, let's start with basics. Hospital Auxiliary, what is that? It was actually founded in 1902, so we're the oldest Hospital Auxiliary in BC. Mainly, it runs the thrift store, so we raise money, we use that money to give comfort and to the accommodations of the long-term care residents. All the labor in the thrift store is volunteer, but I've been focused on the advocacy for that hospital expansion. Now, originally in 1902, this was the Victorian Order of Nurses wanted to build a hospital then. Women couldn't apply for government grants at the time, they went to the municipal government to ask for help. At first, got told, "No, we don't need a hospital," which is sometimes what I hear now, but they were persistent and got the Victorian Order of Nurses behind them, and in 18 months got a hospital built here, so those 21 women didn't take no for an answer, and that's how we got our original hospital. So, describe for our listeners who may not be familiar with the scene here in Caslow. When we talk about a healthcare facility here in town, what do we have right now, and then where does long-term care fit into that? So, we currently have a 9-5 Monday to Friday ER, which in 2013, we used to have 24/7 ER, and it was just difficult to have doctors that were willing to be on call in the evenings to attract rural doctors. So, we've got the ER during business hours, we've got a doctor's clinic, so people can get their doctor's appointments. We've got basically 2.5 full-time equivalent doctors. Then, within that same facility, there's a room that's been used for physiotherapy in the past. There's a lab where people can get their blood work taken, there's radiology, and then we've got the long-term care facility that was built in 1999, and at the time, the government said we needed 20 to 30 beds, and they built 10 rooms at the time with a plan to expand the following year, but then that expansion didn't happen. So, now we've got 18 beds, but some of those beds are in shared rooms, which isn't the ideal currently. Let me stop you for a moment. The plan was to build out the facility to end up with 20 to 30 beds, but that didn't happen. Why? Well, changing government would be one. 2001, the BC Liberals came to power, and they instituted the health authority system across BC, and so that led to health being run like a business, and looking at that bottom line, trying to make things as efficient and cost effective as possible, which leads to centralization, which really doesn't well serve rural communities, because we're left to travel to Nelson or Trail for a lot of our services. But, Caslow's got a lot of seniors, per capita, we've got way less beds. Okay, let's stop there, too. Caslow has lots of seniors. You and I have talked about this before, so you know that I'm about to say that that's no surprise. Unfortunately, every truly small rural community in North America, it's not just a British Columbian phenomenon, is graying, right? Young people, because of the capacity of jobs or simple wanderlust wanting to get out of Dodge, and so the roads and discover the world leave, and retirees follow them into places like Caslow. So, we have a very significant percentage of our population who are over 65, right? It's over a third, and so that compares to 20% average in BC, Canada, Nelson, but here it's 34% and that's as of the census 2021 numbers, so it's probably higher now. So I did some math. This helped make the case to interior health where I said, okay, if you've got 2600 people in Caslow and Area D, 34% is 850 seniors, and we've got 18 beds. In Nelson, if they're 20%, well then that's not the same proportion of beds per senior, because they've got 150 beds with the 75 that just opened up last year. 150? Yes. The new beds were funded in 2020 by the government to announce targeted funding for long-term care beds in BC. 490 of those went into the interior health region, and every single one of those was put into a city. Wow. Listen, let's take a break for a moment so I can find some gloves. I feel frostbite coming on, and the ER is almost closed, so I've got to take care of myself here. And then we'll be back after a little musical interlude with Tyler Doge. [Music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Oh, such is the past of your time ♪ She's rise to fall ♪ ♪ The sun is lit swaddled by the signs ♪ Glowing in the hope ♪ Gonna rise up by my direction magnetically ♪ Gonna rise up by my eyes in the hope ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Gonna rise up by my direction magnetically ♪ Gonna rise up by my direction magnetically My parents moved here in the mid 70s and got involved in the Langham Project. My dad was project manager for part of that and one of the early presidents. So they lived here when I was born. I was born in the Nelson Hospital. I was here for grades 2, 3, and 4. We moved away for his university, but in Calgary. But then when I was 10, we moved to Ottawa. So I had my teens in early 20s in Ottawa. I turned here late 2003 after a couple of years in Nelson and started working at the local computer store back when we had one. And almost immediately joined the board of nonprofit called Caslow InfoNet Society. And at the time it was just running a little community website called Caslow.org hosting different community organizations. But I went to a workshop and found out that there was a bunch of government funding on the way for communities like ours that were behind the digital divide, so to speak, needing broadband. And a long story about Caslow's broadband, but at the time. Hang on, before you go there, let's go back to the earlier days of Ken, of Caslow InfoNet. We're sitting here, right, looking out over the outlet of the bay into the main body of Cootney Lake looking up at the per cells. And can we see a Ken tower up there somewhere? We certainly can. That closer peak, not the very top of Mount Caslow, but the closer Ridge, has a tower that was put there by a company called Mountain Top Wireless that put it there in 2002. And so Caslow InfoNet bought that as our first tower when we put the wireless system up. So I wrote the business plan with some help from Deborah Hamilton of Weng Creek. And we got some funding to get the first wireless towers up and turn kid into an internet service provider. So I spent a lot of time on that mountain tower. There's another one over there that serves Shutty Bench. And then another one down on Lowkey Creek that was serving until they got fiber. So in those days, the towers supported what kind of technology? So it's called Point to Multi-Point Wireless, which just means somebody has an antenna radio dish on their house that's pointing to one of these towers. And the reason we put them across the lake is to get a better line of sight. You got to have a clear line of sight to that tower. So having it on the same shore doesn't work. Ken ended up getting more and more funding, adding more and more towers. To the point where it was serving everybody between house and the Lowkey Least slots, say Woodbury. Just everything north of Woodbury. But then of course, in a later iteration of Ken, everything got upgraded to fiber. So I was on the board for seven years, and then I was staff for six years as sort of the tech support agent doing infrastructure support, climbing those towers. But yeah, now we have some of the best broadband in any real community in BC, let alone Canada. I think we do have the best. I followed you onto the board. And I remember for example, going after a new tranche of funding and being told during the process that led up to actually receiving the grants that made an expansion of Ken's fiber possible, being told by tell us that it was impossible to bring fiber across the lake, right? From Crawford Bay to Balfour. It couldn't be done physically, perhaps it could be done, but it would have been prohibitively expensive. And then running fiber all the way from Balfour up here, never mind from here up to the end of the lake, forget about it. It just couldn't possibly be done. It's neat that the submarine fiber, putting fiber in the lake, because as we all know, we got a lot of power outages here. A tree falls on the highway. We lose power. Having the fiber in the lake was kind of a pilot project, a proof of concept that the person who designed some of that technology ended up using in the Gulf Islands. But yeah, by burying the fiber to each home, we avoided putting cables on the towers, on the hydro lines, hydro poles, where we would have had to spend every month to BC Hydro or tell us to rent those poles. And we used local labor to do it, so a lot cheaper than what other options were presented. Yeah, of course, of course. So yeah, Castle One for now is a great example of something where the need is identified. The powers that be, say, "Oh, you're too small, you don't need it, it's too expensive." You know, tell us, "Wouldn't have done it because there wasn't a business case." But with inspired group of local community champions, you can apply for those grants, make the case, make the business plan, and just find the people in the government that'll listen, and then we can make it happen. Okay, let's take a little break, play a little more music, and then Tyler, when we come back, I want to talk about how what you've just described. The way that this doubty band of locals have made this the broadband epicenter for rural North America, and I'm not being hyperbolic there. I really believe that's the case. How that can be dovetailed into what it has to do with how it might illustrate what you'd like to see happen with long-term care here in Caslow. But first, a little music, and then back with Tyler. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] (upbeat music) ♪ ♪ Well the two gunslayers ♪ We're riding out of town ♪ And we're never from the moon ♪ And there ain't been a gun fight ♪ For a long time ♪ Maybe never ♪ But nobody knows we're sure ♪ I'm taking control of my life ♪ I'm taking control of my life ♪ I'm taking control of my life now ♪ Right now ♪ Oh yeah ♪ Now ♪ Right now ♪ Oh yeah ♪ Now ♪ Right now ♪ Oh yeah I'm back with Tyler Dobby and as I said Tyler before that last little piece of music let's talk a bit now about how the same kind of can-do community spirit that caused kin to become what it has become can be applied to the issue of long-term care and taking care of one-third of the citizenry of Caslow. Well when I joined the hospital auxiliary the expansion committee had been writing letters to interior health in the government and sometimes not getting a response. And so I started to get perseverant and asking pointed questions found out that the wait times were three to six months for those long-term care beds and so they were tried to say that we don't need more beds and so I started breaking down the demographic numbers and getting their attention. I got Brittany Anderson, our LMOA, here with the Chief Operations Officer of Clinical Operations for interior health into the facility here in Caslow and got them to see with a few anecdotes of the effect that our services have on the people here that that needs. So we've now got them to commit to apply for the funding to get a comprehensive planning study done. So the funding would be provided by interior health? That's correct. Yeah. They prioritize the projects. Of course all that funding comes from the provincial government, but interior health decides how to allocate it. And so I'll keep writing letters through this year as they decide which funding to allocate. Right. And so through the next year I want to engage the community and get buy-in on a vision for the facility, what do we want, what, how can we turn this into more than just an expansion of the long-term care and get more beds? It's a big enough piece of property that we could put housing there. We can have some seniors housing. We can have staff housing is essential because interior health has trouble hiring people if they can't find a place to rent. So I'm going to be set up a little table that we're going to have an aging and caslow fair organized by community services and a few other organizations where seniors can come and adults of all ages to learn about different services that are available in caslow. And that's where I'm going to start with a survey and get some anecdotes, get some people's experiences with the care that we have currently so that we can help build that case and illustrate the need. And when might that take place? That's going to be in April. I believe April 25th. And then we're going to follow that up in the fall with more of a symposium summit-type roundtable event where we can have a real community discussion and have some of the powers that become and visit to hear that feedback that we've gathered. And I've gotten a commitment from the BC Seniors Advocate Dan Levit to come here in September. Okay, and conclusion. If you could wave a magic wand and look ahead five to 10 years from now, what would you hope to see up where the current health care facility is in Upper Caslow? So where the staff parking is now is enough space to build a really decent-size apartment building. So we would need to do some underground parking for the residents and the staff. But I'd also like to see a community health center where there's a common area. And we're going to have a place for people to use and come together and get access to different resources. And then in those apartments, we can have that transition from independent living to assisted care, getting people their care in their home so they can age in place and retain their dignity. And that'll also free up a lot of homes in Caslow because currently seniors don't have anywhere to downsize to if they don't want to live in a big home but want to stay in their community. So all of those things can come together. Yeah, so and then expanding the long-term care, having that all on the same floor is where the current long-term care is, just expanding it out as was the original vision in 1999. But doing something to meet all of our needs. Okay, Tyler, that's very interesting. There you go, folks. A conversation with Tyler Dobie just showing that not every younger person doesn't give a rat's rear end about those of us who are slightly less spy and youthful. Really appreciate your time, Tyler. I hope all of this comes about and we'll stay in touch with you and we'll talk some more about this when the spring rolls are around. Thanks for having me, Randy. It's been a good conversation. Let's go get warm. You bet. (upbeat music) Well, folks, that's all the time we have for today's show. Thanks so much to Tyler Dobie for braving the cold and having a very stimulating conversation with me. I hope that your day is going well. I hope you have a wonderful evening and a fantastic weekend ahead. And until our radio paths cross again, this is Randy Moore swishing you, happy trails from right here at Radio Free Cowslow. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) ♪ And my mother's service been on the same song ♪ ♪ And I've been on the same song ♪ ♪ And the feeling is that the sun is red ♪ ♪ 'Cause I can't find her words ♪ ♪ And I can't find her songs ♪ ♪ Stop it, spread it, stop shouting ♪ ♪ Stop it, spread it, stop shouting ♪ ♪ Stop shouting ♪ ♪ You're saying I'm the place ♪ [BLANK_AUDIO]