The Critical Compass Podcast - May 03, 2026


Alberta Independence NEEDS Level Heads to Win

Mentioned
Aaron Weeks David Parker Michaela James Mike
The Centurion Project： Engaging Citizens in the Political Process Mitch Sylvestre Delivers Over 300K Independence Signatures to Elections Alberta

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

130.84

Word count

1,799

Sentence count

45


Summary

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

In this episode of The Critical Compass, James talks about the Centurion Project, the Global News hack, and the ongoing investigation into the allegations surrounding it. He also talks about what to look out for when attending events in support of the movement.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi, it's James here with the Critical Compass. This week has been a very interesting week when
00:00:08.800 it comes to Alberta independence and I thought I would come down to the River Valley here in
00:00:15.360 Edmonton just to just to get a grounded perspective on things. I feel like people have been caught up
00:00:25.600 with the drama and i feel like it's easy to lose our perspective along the way
00:00:33.580 so what hasn't changed this week is uh we have dedicated people we have a decentralized movement
00:00:43.980 we have very passionate people all pushing towards the same goal
00:00:48.480 Unfortunately, what I've noticed this last week with the Centurion Project, with the
00:00:56.720 allegations and with the ongoing investigation is that people have been quick to turn on
00:01:04.760 each other, even with incomplete information.
00:01:10.820 Now the thing is, this is not going to be the only attack.
00:01:15.760 This is not the only chance for the movement to become divided.
00:01:22.580 This will ramp up as we go throughout the next six months leading up until the referendum.
00:01:31.160 If all it takes for people to turn on each other are accusations and a mob mentality
00:01:37.480 online, then we're not going to make it through the next six months.
00:01:42.460 this is where it takes some cooler heads to push through and I think we can lose
00:01:49.000 sense of ourselves when we spend too much time on these platforms and it is
00:01:59.260 very heated so I think we need to keep our eye on the prize and that is
00:02:07.220 educating, that is reaching out to friends and family, that is doing everything that
00:02:12.800 we can to set this movement up for success. It's important that we wait for
00:02:20.060 complete information before we lose ourselves in a frenzy. Especially with
00:02:29.300 the movement being decentralized, there is a fear of being guilty by association
00:02:36.460 of anything. And I know people get a little bit on edge, and it's easy to just default to
00:02:47.060 smearing other people. That's what I've noticed a lot. So let's unpack this Centurion project.
00:02:55.000 There's currently an investigation. What we don't know is the source of the information,
00:03:01.740 the database. We don't know that yet. We also don't know the full details because the investigation
00:03:09.320 is still ongoing. Mike and I went to the opening event, recorded some speeches and got a perspective
00:03:18.540 there and that was on Wednesday. The core message, it's a really good one. Essentially apathy has
00:03:27.840 taken hold and people are not taking responsibility and stepping up as active citizens that's the
00:03:35.200 essence of the centurion project and that core message can exist with or without any app with
00:03:41.900 or without any database because it takes you just reaching out to friends and family and
00:03:48.100 stepping up to ensure that they are informed and that they will go out and vote as well
00:03:55.440 So at the event, there's a few things I wanted to point out.
00:04:01.720 So Global News is there, and they asked to be there,
00:04:06.060 and David Parker had no problem with them showing up.
00:04:10.540 Then there's also this citizen journalist, or so-called journalist, called Aaron Weeks.
00:04:17.280 and he was there with um his friend Michaela who was also live streaming and they were recording
00:04:25.760 and they have come to other events and uh like there was one in St. Albert recently um
00:04:33.240 I think there's a creative minds event as well and they have been agitators in a sense um so
00:04:42.460 They have not been reporting accurately, and they have not been portraying the moments.
00:04:49.360 They've been asking questions to try to get a response.
00:04:53.380 There was a question period at the end, and Aaron Weeks was in the lineup,
00:05:00.900 and Global News was focused on the stage.
00:05:04.420 And as Aaron got closer in the lineup, in the question line,
00:05:08.120 global news turned their camera and walked in on the question lineup almost like he knew
00:05:16.480 aaron was going to ask a question giving a good sound bite um so i don't know if there was any
00:05:24.880 coordination there i don't know if aaron went up to the global news guy and said i'm gonna ask a
00:05:30.460 a spicy question uh make sure you capture it but these are the things to be watching out for
00:05:37.620 So when Aaron went up, he asked this question
00:05:42.560 He asked, why do you guys not believe in freedom of speech?
00:05:48.680 And a few people pushed back on him in the crowd
00:05:51.860 And there was some give and take
00:05:55.060 And then they essentially let him have his full 30 seconds to ask the question
00:06:00.820 But he blamed them for calling everybody liberals
00:06:06.080 and for not letting people speak.
00:06:10.060 So it's not a genuine question.
00:06:12.460 If he was really interested in dialogue,
00:06:14.680 he would have asked a serious question.
00:06:18.880 He would have stuck around.
00:06:20.040 He would have engaged with the people who are all presenters.
00:06:23.580 They're willing to have conversations.
00:06:25.620 So that would have happened.
00:06:28.460 But I think it's just for a soundbite,
00:06:30.400 let it be for global news or on his own channel.
00:06:33.900 so it doesn't take much to frame the movement and this is this goes back to my larger point
00:06:41.560 about the attacks essentially any moment can be weaponized against the movement so we do need to
00:06:51.340 be careful but at the same time you can't prevent everybody from taking every little thing out of
00:06:58.540 context. It's, it's impossible at that point. So the other thing that happened is, uh, David
00:07:05.620 Parker, he had a speech and then shortly after, uh, cops were, that's when the cops arrived to
00:07:13.440 deliver the papers. That's seven cruisers, 10 officers, I believe, and one official from
00:07:20.420 elections alberta i didn't uh i didn't know that was going on um i was filming i was focused on
00:07:30.080 the stage and i noticed aaron and michaela and them went outside a couple other people went
00:07:38.440 outside so i don't know how they knew that the cops were there right at the moment um
00:07:47.060 like nobody else like most people in the crowd were just watching
00:07:52.660 so for them to know exactly when to go outside to get that footage
00:07:58.300 is concerning that implies that there's some prior knowledge of this
00:08:02.140 i don't know it's hard to know for sure
00:08:06.140 um so that that was a strange piece of the puzzle as well
00:08:12.720 it's also why did elections alberta need need seven cop cars there there is no need for that
00:08:24.760 many cars or officers uh and i think it does a couple it serves a couple purposes
00:08:32.660 one it's a show of force it's an intimidation tactic
00:08:37.720 I think other events may be worried that, okay, well, are cops going to show up?
00:08:48.000 Like, just seeing that many is intimidation.
00:08:51.900 The other part of it is it creates a great visual for headlines.
00:08:59.100 And that kind of image now will be propagated ad nauseum on media.
00:09:07.440 so that is no different than the flags that showed up at the convoy is like when you have
00:09:16.320 somebody ready to take a picture and you have that event and now that picture defines an entire
00:09:22.020 evening or an entire movement etc it's really easy and there's no way that this could have been
00:09:31.360 avoided in the moment regardless of what the actual outcome of the investigation is in the
00:09:38.840 moment there is no way of avoiding that photo op police showed up and there were bad actors to
00:09:46.260 get footage take that photo and propagate that photo and now it's part of the
00:09:51.160 it's part of the uh the media landscape so there's a lot of outrage with the data
00:10:00.140 being released and i have not seen the same kind of attention put into the
00:10:08.280 30 million phones that were tracked during covid or any of the number any of the numerous
00:10:15.720 breaches, let it be from the private sector or government databases, leaking information of the
00:10:22.440 public. There are those that are treating this like the end of the world and it's a hard thing
00:10:29.080 to engage with and I think we'll have to wait until the investigation is over to be able to
00:10:36.520 to be able to navigate this fully so the question is does this set the
00:10:42.760 independence movement back I think it's not making it easier by any means but
00:10:53.580 those that are caught up in Nahid Nenshi's rhetoric are not the ones that
00:11:00.700 are going to be convinced anyways but we we do need to be mindful and we do need to be squeaky
00:11:07.820 clean going forward have receipts for everything this is one of the reasons that we're trying to
00:11:13.420 document some of these events and we also have like max from the freedom calendar he's doing
00:11:21.180 great work and this is creating a record of everything as it goes forward so all these events
00:11:27.980 we're reducing how much you can misrepresent one of these events
00:11:34.260 but we cannot give easy ammo to anybody who wants to smear the movement
00:11:41.020 so just to wrap up I think we need to take a stoic mindset on this
00:11:49.220 we need to control the things that we can control
00:11:51.720 and not let those things that we can't control bother us
00:11:57.180 we need to not spend so much time on x or facebook or instagram or any of these places where
00:12:05.160 you're just bombarded by messages all the time it can skew how much how common a certain belief is
00:12:15.180 or how prevalent an idea is because you may see it pop in your feed and it's pushing that
00:12:21.900 and it's aggregating that but I would one thing you could do is just go to a public place and
00:12:30.980 ask a person what they know about this and I'm sure you will not get the same kind of rhetoric
00:12:38.720 you'll get some misconceptions but it will not be anything close to what we're seeing on X
00:12:45.080 So we need to push forward
00:12:49.280 We need to elevate voices in the movement
00:12:54.100 That are doing a good job
00:12:55.340 We need to get out to these events
00:12:57.880 Keep spreading the word
00:12:59.240 We need to reach out to family members
00:13:01.100 We need to keep a level head
00:13:02.940 So thanks for sticking to the end
00:13:05.300 Let me know if you'd like more kind of videos like this
00:13:10.580 I do enjoy coming out to the River Valley
00:13:14.580 please like and subscribe it helps these videos grow consider donating to us we've got a buy me
00:13:23.060 a coffee link and also you can drop a thanks a donation through youtube itself that just helps
00:13:30.000 us with the time for going out to events shooting and editing and the equipment it all adds up so
00:13:37.500 every little bit counts.
00:13:42.600 Thanks for joining and
00:13:43.760 we'll see you in the next one.