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Ordinarily compiled by assistant editor Emily Blake, The Outhouse selects 10 of our best or most important pieces of reporting from the past week.

The newsletter also carries updates on some top stories, a look into what’s happening inside Cabin Radio – like how we’re getting ready for FM broadcasting after this week’s CRTC decision – and links to other things we’re reading that we recommend.

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Below, take a look at this week’s edition as a sample.

Cabin Radio gets ready for 93.9 FM

Hello! This is Ollie, Cabin Radio’s editor, in for newsletter czar Emily, who is on leave.

Yes, you are correct, there was no newsletter last week and this one is late. Don’t tell Emily, for the love of god.

At least this week there’s an excuse. It’s been an extraordinary week at Cabin Radio Towers: on Wednesday, after five years and 11 months precisely, the CRTC granted Cabin Radio the right to broadcast on 93.9 FM in Yellowknife.

We had been refreshing the CRTC’s website like crazy at 9am each day this week, having been told the decision would come at some point during the week but having been given no further intel, beyond knowing most CRTC decisions are published at 11am ET.

On Wednesday, there it was. I opened it with an extraordinary amount of apprehension, not forgetting the sensation of the “no” the CRTC delivered in 2023, when the regulator decided Yellowknife’s market could not support two commercial stations. This time, the answer was different, and Scott and I shared a hug in Studio One.

That afternoon, the population of Yellowknife cleaned us out of 93.9 FM merch that we’d been saving for this moment. The local bookstore placed a sign on the street congratulating us. I haven’t been able to walk 10 feet around the city since Wednesday without someone stopping to say nice things.

Thanks, Yellowknife (and the NWT), for all your support. There’s a Q&A here about what happens next, and I’ll try to supply Emily with regular updates for future newsletters about where we’re at with moving to FM, since it requires a few fiddly final steps.

In the meantime, on with our recap of some of the past week’s top stories. Emily returns next week.

In this newsletter

• Our best stories
• What happened on Cabin’s FM journey since Wednesday
• Cabin Radio with Team NT at the Canada Games

Stories to catch up on

1. Nest owners urge council to help with fire hydrant vault obstacle

The people turning a downtown Yellowknife office block into housing say a requirement for a fire hydrant vault is the “hitch” stopping them from opening.

2. Panel dismisses Barlas appeal over misappropriation of millions

An appeal from Ron Barlas – over a ruling that he engaged in “egregious conduct” as the Denesoline Corporation’s boss – was dismissed by a three-judge panel.

3. Q&A: What’s going on with the power supply in Hay River?

We asked the NWT Power Corporation’s president to explain what’s behind multiple lengthy outages in Hay River this week, and how NTPC is responding.

4. ‘You are enough and you’re worthy to belong in these spaces’

An Inuk psychiatrist who grew up in Hay River hopes, after recently graduating, to be a role model to young Indigenous people pursuing careers in medicine.

5. Hay River approves new cemetery worth nearly $1 million

The Town of Hay River is moving ahead with plans to turn a field on the community’s southern edge into a new cemetery at a projected cost of $992,680.

6. In the red, Folk on the Rocks launches fundraiser

After one night of this year’s festival was wiped out by a storm, and with existing financial challenges, Folk on the Rocks is launching a fundraising campaign.

7. CN says it’ll help fix ‘horrific’ Hay River rail crossings

Two years after CN ended freight service to and from Hay River, residents say rail crossings in the town are becoming dangerous. The company says it’ll act.

8. City wants to end dump amnesty days, could try vouchers instead

City staff want to end amnesty days at Yellowknife’s dump, saying they cost too much, cause safety concerns and undermine efforts to carefully dispose of waste.

9. Fort Smith couple to open independent pharmacy

“We love being here and want to provide the best care.” After a decade in Fort Smith, Rafiq Salehmohamed and Molly McAllister are opening their own pharmacy.

10. Explore these ‘global bites’ served at the NWT Culinary Festival

The NWT Culinary Festival served up a 10-course meal celebrating some of Yellowknife’s global culinary influences. Take a look at the dishes.

Updates on the FM journey

Here are a few extra notes on what’s happened since Wednesday’s big CRTC announcement. We’ll try to keep you in the loop!

Obviously, the big thing that has to happen now is putting up a transmitter that will carry our FM signal. We don’t have the transmitter yet as it’s a big expense and would have been a risky investment based on the past six years of regulatory decision-making. Now we have the green light, which is great, but we can’t just pop out and find a suitably powerful transmitter in Yellowknife. It has to come from elsewhere.

We also have to finalize plans for where the transmitter will go. We had tentatively agreed to lease space on top of a downtown Yellowknife building and we’ve initiated the process of turning that into a proper agreement. The site we had in mind has undergone one or two changes since we selected it years ago, so we also need our engineers to give it the once-over and make sure everything still looks good and nothing will interfere with our signal. We’ve started the ball rolling on that, too.

On Friday, we met with our consultants for the first time since the decision came out. Andrew and Rita, who have decades of experience working for and with the CRTC, have been with us since 2019, so they’ve gone through the whole rollercoaster as part of the team. Friday’s meeting was about making sure we understand each of the conditions attached to our licence (nothing out of the ordinary among those conditions but this is our first rodeo, so let’s be sure we’re interpreting everything correctly), and discussing some of the intricacies of the annual reporting we’ll now need to provide – plus how we make sure we meet our music selection criteria.

As an example, we have promised the CRTC that 40 percent of the music we’ll play in a given broadcast week will be Canadian content. A broadcast week is not the same as a regular week! Broadcast weeks include just 126 hours, because the hours between midnight and 6am each day are not included. We will still be on the air during those hours, but nothing we do in the dead of night counts toward our Canadian content requirements or other conditions of our licence.

Of that 40 percent, we’ve said 35 percent will be from emerging Canadian artists. The CRTC recently defined an emerging artist as someone who released their first song (commercially) within the past four years. In other words, 14 percent of all the music we play will be from relatively new Canadian artists, or about three songs in every 20. Most stations play far less emerging Canadian content than this, largely because they’re all trying to pump out as many hits as possible to keep you locked during your commute in the big city each day, where 20 or 30 stations are vying for your ears. We are very intentionally not that kind of station, and we place great emphasis on playing northern and Indigenous artists as well as new music – see Out of the Bear Cave, our weekly new music show at 6pm each Tuesday. We’re confident our audience wants to hear plenty of new stuff as long as we give it the right context and explain what they’re hearing, who it’s from, and why we like it.

Scott and I now have the job of masterminding the initial FM playlist to meet all these criteria. Our existing online playlist is already close, but we need to add in some reporting and tagging that allows us to demonstrate in annual reports that we’re hitting the markers set out in our licence. This is the kind of thing we’re now setting up behind the scenes before we can flip the switch and broadcast on FM.

Lastly, I’m concocting a plan for how our test broadcast will sound. FM stations often air some form of test broadcast in the lead-up to launch to be sure the technical parameters are correct and there are no obvious glitches. We’d like our test broadcast to be memorable, so I’ve started sketching out how that might sound.

Cabin Radio at the Canada Games

I’m heading to Newfoundland on Friday with Team NT to cover the 2025 Canada Games (and volunteer as the team’s media liaison, helping journalists across the North and the rest of the country cover NWT athletes’ exploits).

Follow the team’s progress through updates I’ll be sharing to Team NT’s channels on Facebook and Instagram, plus the biggest moments will be covered on Cabin Radio, too. You’ll see stories on our website or you can listen to my show from St John’s from 10am till 12pm each weekday.

Swimmer Tony Shi has been announced as the team’s flagbearer for the opening ceremony, which takes place on Saturday, August 9. Find out more about Tony here.