PJ The Belt - April 09, 2026


＂IT'S TIME＂ Albertans Ready To EXIT Canada in 2026 Vote

Topics
equalization payments independence for alberta
Mentioned
Pierre Trudeau Donald Trump Stay Free Alberta Elections Alberta Peter Lougheed Easy
Alberta Just Secured a Deal DIRECTLY With Trump - Canada is Irrelevant They Just Found a $1 TRILLION Goldmine in Alberta

Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

160.17

Word count

2,862

Sentence count

186

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A citizen-led petition calling for Alberta to seek independence from Canada is gaining momentum across the province, and the Stay Free Alberta campaign is collecting signatures for the chance to vote on the question: Do you agree that the province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state? That s the question that they re hoping for.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The group Stay Free Alberta started the petition last week. The group said it collected more than
00:00:05.000 the 178,000 signatures needed to trigger a referendum a month before its deadline to
00:00:10.280 submit them to Elections Alberta. A citizen-led petition calling for Alberta to seek independence
00:00:15.960 from Canada is gaining momentum across the province. The Stay Free Alberta campaign is
00:00:21.560 collecting signatures for the chance to vote on the question. Do you agree that the province of
00:00:26.060 Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state? That's the question
00:00:31.300 that they're hoping for. The push comes as new polling suggests support for Alberta sovereignty
00:00:35.560 is on the rise. Hey everybody, it's PJ. Today we're going to be doing a little bit of a different
00:00:40.420 video. What I'm trying to do in this video is to basically talk about those crucial conversations
00:00:48.900 that we're going to have to have with the undecided folks, those people in the middle,
00:00:53.180 Those who are sitting on the fence, not the people who will never be convinced, but those in the middle, those who may not know much about this, those who may not be informed, those who may not have the information you and I have.
00:01:07.300 That's what this video is going to be about.
00:01:09.540 Let's get into the meat of it.
00:01:10.560 When you're talking to people who are on the fence, remember this, the pro-Canada side, the federalist side, those who support Canada staying the way it is in its current malfunctioning situation, they don't often, they rarely ever have logical arguments.
00:01:27.880 They lean on attacks. They'll call you, you know, hillbilly. These Albertans, they just keep whining, whining hillbillies, this and that, and so on, among many other things that they use. They don't have logical arguments. They have bribery. Of course, you have random politicians, former politicians coming out of nowhere.
00:01:47.900 I think, look, the real problem here is if the Trump administration has been willing to meet with Canadian separatists in secret, which is a clear intervention in our domestic politics.
00:02:05.160 And I would not be, given the way that Donald Trump conducts himself, the least bit surprised.
00:02:10.620 If he weighs in heavily on this prospective referendum, I think the government of Canada should be sending very clear signals.
00:02:19.860 We could not tolerate that.
00:02:21.400 They're going to get more and more politicians to be on their side, particularly those on the left.
00:02:26.660 This is what they're going to do.
00:02:28.360 It's only going to get worse and worse.
00:02:30.400 The attacks are going to be more pronounced and more frequent.
00:02:33.920 And then the other thing they have is feelings. They have nostalgia. They're going to use feelings. You know, they're going to tell you, oh, you know, especially if you're a person who, you know, you're 70 years old, 60 years old, you know, you've lived in Canada all your life. Canada's been home for you. They'll tell you, well, you're betraying the country.
00:02:53.480 They won't tell you the fact that Canada, as it stands, is a country, especially if you're an Albertan, who that's really the only people that matter when it comes to this because these are the people who are going to vote for the independence referendum.
00:03:05.660 Those are the only people entitled to vote legally in the independence referendum is Albertans.
00:03:11.640 If you've been an Albertan long enough, you know that your province has had it rough in confederation, that Canada has never given Alberta a fair shake.
00:03:21.620 You know what happened with the national energy program during Trudeau Senior, during Pierre Elliott Trudeau, when Peter Lougheed was the premier of Alberta. You know what happened during those days. You know when Pierre Trudeau gave the middle finger to Western Canada, literally the middle finger to Western Canada.
00:03:42.960 You know that and you remember that.
00:03:45.440 So they try to bring this nostalgia.
00:03:47.680 All they're doing is trying to shut down your logical thinking and get you to become emotional about the conversation around sovereignty as opposed to thinking about it logically.
00:03:58.780 Don't give up on Canada.
00:04:00.140 Remember the good old days.
00:04:01.500 But Canada isn't the same country it used to be.
00:04:04.580 It's abandoned Alberta, not the other way around.
00:04:07.400 And it's done it one too many times.
00:04:08.980 And it seems that Albertans have finally had enough.
00:04:11.640 Let's talk about the facts, those facts that I want you to remember in the conversations that you're going to be having, hopefully.
00:04:18.460 I'm going to spell this out first.
00:04:20.460 There's the reality of equalization payments.
00:04:23.160 I bring that one up first because it's one of the most obvious ones, and it's numbers, and numbers don't care about feelings.
00:04:28.820 So I bring that one up.
00:04:29.820 It's numbers.
00:04:30.660 Alberta is, and this is a fact, per capita, the top contributor to equalization in Canada.
00:04:36.420 And it's not even close.
00:04:37.780 The top contributor per capita. Sure, Ontario has the biggest economy, but per capita, per each Albertan, Alberta produces far more than Ontario. It also gives more than it receives. Ontario receives more, especially nowadays, than it gives out in economic output.
00:04:57.140 And Alberta has been the number one producer per capita for decades, the number one contributor to equalization for decades.
00:05:04.060 We send billions of dollars out and get zero, exactly zero in return.
00:05:09.220 Look at equalization payments this year.
00:05:12.280 Again, a big fat zero for Alberta, Saskatchewan, BC even.
00:05:16.900 But it's worst in Alberta because Alberta is the largest contributor to it by far per capita.
00:05:23.480 And then this money is used to be given to provinces that then turn around and criticize us, like Quebec. Quebec blocks energy development in Canada, particularly from Alberta with our dirty oil, like the Frenchies like to call it. 0.60
00:05:38.380 But the $14 billion that they get from that dirty oil is very clean, it seems, because they love it and they take it all the time. They love that cash pipeline. They just don't like the pipeline that produces said cash, oil pipelines. 1.00
00:05:53.480 They refuse to develop their own natural resources. You can look it up right now. And that is a prime example of how unfair the system is. Let's talk about the electoral imbalance. Another fact that those on the other side of the conversation never like to acknowledge or recognize.
00:06:11.920 in eastern canada a vote carries more weight than in western canada than in saskatchewan and alberta
00:06:19.360 it's like a two-for-one deal basically one vote in the east can have the power of two votes
00:06:24.300 in the west and i'll explain and then we have the unelected senate of course to add insult to
00:06:30.780 injury alberta with its five million people we just surpassed five million people and its huge 0.89
00:06:36.940 financial contributions, which we just discussed, gets only six senators. They're unelected and we
00:06:43.260 only get six allocated unelected senators for the entirety of Alberta with 5 million people.
00:06:49.320 Meanwhile, take a province like New Brunswick, for example, with a fraction of the population,
00:06:53.820 I think they're around 1 million, right? And they get 10 senators. Make it make sense. And again,
00:07:00.840 there's the reality that senators are unelected, appointed by the prime minister and Trudeau
00:07:05.580 flooded filled the senate with liberal activists right and alberta only gets six with a five million
00:07:13.380 population while a province like new brunswick nova scotia with way less people and way less
00:07:18.100 financial power than alberta get 10 senators each make it make sense that is something you can bring
00:07:24.980 to the table and that's a fact i'll show you the map right on the screen that's a fact that's not
00:07:29.940 opinion that's a fact of canada today that alone is recent enough for alberta to want to make a
00:07:37.240 huge change and alberta has tried we're going to talk about that has tried for decades to make
00:07:44.100 that change from inside canada to no avail the system is rigged against us we're not treated
00:07:50.200 like equal partners in confederation we'll treat we're treated like the western colonies of canada
00:07:55.540 Canada is the east, the Maritimes, Ontario and Quebec. That's Canada. Western Canada, particularly Alberta and Saskatchewan, are basically colonies of the rest of Canada.
00:08:07.700 let's not forget like i said the history back in the 1980s preston manning those of you who've
00:08:13.980 lived long enough will know preston manning and the reform party they tried to fix this whole
00:08:18.900 situation with a campaign that they called the west wants in basically looking for more
00:08:24.140 representation within canada more fairness within canada for the west they asked for a fair deal
00:08:30.640 and the east said no they opposed them at every turn instead of reform they doubled down what
00:08:37.560 hammer down and here we are decades later still having the same exact conversation because nothing
00:08:42.400 has fundamentally changed it's the exact same let's talk about what an independent alberta
00:08:48.260 would actually gain these are the facts of what alberta would gain this is not an exhaustive list
00:08:53.240 because the list is so long but these are some of the main ones that i could think of that i think
00:08:57.600 are very relevant to bring to the conversation and bring to the dinner table because this is
00:09:02.920 where it gets serious. Alberta sends more wealth. We've established that more financial output and
00:09:08.780 more revenue into confederation than it gets back. We produce more than we consume. Surplus, right?
00:09:14.340 We're a net contributor and buy a lot. Independence means that that money stays here. It stays in
00:09:21.480 Alberta, in Albertan territory, in Albertan soil, funding our own infrastructure, our own healthcare.
00:09:28.700 We can make it look however we want. We want it the way it is right now, but actually less corrupt and more efficient than we can do it. We want single payer universal. We can keep it that way. It'll be up to us and we can fund it more efficiently. Tax relief. We can cut taxes. Alberta is already the lowest taxed jurisdiction in Canada by choice because Albertans want lower taxes, not because Canada is benevolent, right?
00:09:52.480 And then future investments would stay here.
00:09:55.880 We would manage our own pension, which would create jobs because someone has to manage that pension. 0.98
00:10:00.940 And there has to be an entire structure for it.
00:10:03.820 And we could have it.
00:10:04.840 Look at Quebec.
00:10:05.420 Quebec manages its own pension, and that creates jobs in Quebec.
00:10:08.700 So an independent Alberta could create jobs in Alberta in that financial institution that would be the Alberta pension plan.
00:10:14.440 getting young Albertans in the financial sector to get jobs, to produce more money, pay taxes
00:10:20.920 into that exact same pension plan for Alberta seniors, right? So that's another thing you can
00:10:27.080 bring to the conversation. Talking about pensions, right? Alberta has one of the youngest and most
00:10:30.900 productive workforces in all of Canada. That means Albertans contribute more to the Canada
00:10:37.080 Pension Plan, the CPP, than they consume. Alberta seniors draw less from CPP than Alberta workers
00:10:44.280 pay in. You're noticing a pattern here. You're noticing a trend, right? Alberta produces more
00:10:49.980 than it consumes. That's the reality of Alberta, and most provinces are not that way. They take
00:10:54.660 more than they give. This creates a surplus, and that's why in recent reports, it was all over the
00:11:00.200 news, it showed that Alberta would be owed a massive share of CPP assets if it left. Alberta
00:11:08.760 would be owed high estimates have it about half of of all of cpp moderate and modest estimates
00:11:14.920 have it about a quarter which is still insane considering there's 10 provinces alberta alone
00:11:20.680 being owed a quarter of the entire pension plan crazy to think and that's it makes sense though
00:11:27.800 when you think about it because we've been subsidizing the rest of the country for many
00:11:31.680 decades when it comes to that as well then there's this idea that alberta would be landlocked that's
00:11:36.860 the thing that they're going to throw at you besides the insults calling you names you know
00:11:41.160 you're just a bunch of hillbillies they're going to say that alberta's landlocked right we are
00:11:46.760 policy landlocked right now and i'll explain we've tried to build a pipeline to the west coast for
00:11:52.040 example and british colombia recently has said no just uh no we're not gonna coastal first nations
00:11:58.020 our government blah blah blah a million hurdles a million reasons to say no right we tried to
00:12:05.180 build energy east as well and then quebec said no to that one as a province we have no real leverage
00:12:10.920 there's nothing we can do other than complaints to the government and that goes nowhere as an
00:12:15.580 independent country that changes very rapidly alberta could say fine you can block our pipelines
00:12:22.520 to bc for example but your goods don't cross our territory without a tariff you want to get to
00:12:28.140 eastern canada from british colombia every single ship every single container passing on rail or any
00:12:35.060 truck. Every truck will have to pay a tariff. And then we have more power. Then there's the whole
00:12:41.280 UN access to ports, which is international law for independent states, nation states.
00:12:47.800 Alberta would fall under that when we gain our independence. But then there's also the fact that
00:12:52.340 we could negotiate directly with the United States. A sovereign nation of Alberta would
00:12:57.140 have international rights, including United Nations access to tidewater and the ability
00:13:02.080 to negotiate directly with other countries. Most importantly, we could deal directly with our
00:13:06.440 closest ally just south of the border of the United States, which is way more welcoming of
00:13:10.160 Alberta energy. How do I know that? Where do most of our pipelines go? Where do most Canadian energy
00:13:17.460 pipelines go? Do they go east and west and north, or do they go south towards the United States?
00:13:22.800 The U.S. has always been more welcoming of Canadian energy than the rest of Canada.
00:13:26.900 That's another fact.
00:13:28.060 So we could deal with them instead.
00:13:29.320 We could access ports in Washington state or Oregon, you know, instead of being held hostage by Ottawa as a sub-national subordinate government, you know.
00:13:41.100 And finally, an independent Alberta would be free.
00:13:44.420 This one's huge.
00:13:45.520 Free from Ottawa's green agenda.
00:13:47.580 The whole climate thing, you know.
00:13:49.600 We'll be free from that.
00:13:50.800 We'd no longer be shackled by federal policies that attack our energy industry.
00:13:55.140 We wouldn't have to deal with carbon taxes. We could drill baby drill. You know, that freedom means more production, right? Which means more money, lower taxes, stronger growth and higher standards of living for Alberta.
00:14:08.220 We'll be one of the wealthiest countries on earth because our resources, our resources are plenty, unimaginable, unimaginably bountiful.
00:14:19.320 There's so much resources, not just oil.
00:14:22.120 You know, there's our farmlands, our minerals under the ground, but also our people, Albertans, some of the hardest working people on earth and some of the most qualified workers in the world.
00:14:34.040 We'll be one of the wealthiest countries on earth.
00:14:36.400 Easy, quick.
00:14:37.920 So here's the bottom line.
00:14:39.300 Have these conversations.
00:14:40.960 Stick to the facts.
00:14:42.260 Stay calm.
00:14:44.180 Don't get sucked into the insults or emotional bait.
00:14:47.720 That's why they want to drag you to the mud.
00:14:49.540 Don't.
00:14:49.860 We got the facts.
00:14:50.960 They got a tax.
00:14:51.980 We got the facts.
00:14:53.180 They got a tax.
00:14:54.760 You're not trying to win an argument.
00:14:56.080 You're planting seeds.
00:14:57.100 You're trying to get people, those who are convincible, those who are persuadable, those who are listening, to hear the facts.
00:15:05.360 That's how you build majority support.
00:15:07.800 Talk to your friends.
00:15:08.580 Talk to your family.
00:15:09.280 Talk to your neighbors.
00:15:10.440 Share this video.
00:15:12.100 Do it because it'll answer questions that some people may have.
00:15:16.440 If you enjoyed the conversation that you and I just had here, then definitely share the video.
00:15:23.460 You know, it's free and it's a way to, if you agree with the things you heard, to let people know where you're at.
00:15:29.820 Subscribe if you haven't, especially if this video earned your subscription.
00:15:34.780 I would appreciate it.
00:15:35.780 That's also free.
00:15:36.640 Just press that red button and click the notifications bell so that it notifies you whenever I drop a new video.
00:15:43.140 And thanks for watching.
00:15:44.560 I really appreciate it.
00:15:45.940 I talk about Alberta independence as much as possible on this channel,
00:15:48.820 and I'll try to keep you guys informed about everything Alberta independence and Western Canada.
00:15:55.000 I'll see you guys in the next one.
00:15:56.080 It's been PJ.
00:15:57.120 Peace.
00:15:57.640 Stay free, sweet Alberta, coming for to carry us home.
00:16:09.260 Stay free, sweet Alberta, coming for to carry us home.
00:16:20.520 I looked over Calgary and what did I see?
00:16:25.660 Coming for to carry us home
00:16:30.100 I saw a line of truckers coming after me
00:16:36.860 Coming for to carry us home
00:16:41.280 Stay free, stay free, sweet Alberta
00:16:46.100 Coming for to carry us home
00:16:52.220 Stay free, sweet Alberta
00:16:56.980 Coming for to carry us home
00:17:03.000 If you get back to freedom before I do
00:17:09.220 Coming for to carry us home
00:17:13.640 You'll tell all your friends I'll be staying free too
00:17:20.080 Coming for to carry us home
00:17:24.500 Stay free, sweet Alberta
00:17:29.560 Coming for to carry us home
00:17:35.320 Stay free, sweet Alberta
00:17:40.460 Coming for to carry us home
00:17:50.080 You