The Critical Compass Podcast - January 19, 2026


Edmonton Alberta Independence Petition Signing Turnout FACT CHECK - Responding to the Naysayers

Guests
The Critical Compass
Mentioned
Stay Free Alberta James
Edmonton SHOWS UP for Alberta Independence How to Talk to Your Liberal Friends About Alberta Independence - ＂ASK QUESTIONS!＂ ｜ Nadine Wellwood

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

132.42

Word count

394

Sentence count

29


Summary

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

A quick fact check on the numbers and overall size of the Independence Petition event in Edmonton on January 17, 2019. If you still need to sign, go to stayfreealberta.ca for up-to-date information on all official petition events.

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. I just wanted to do a quick fact check on the
00:00:07.600 numbers and the overall size of the Independence Petition event January 17th, Rundle Park in
00:00:14.120 Edmonton. The event was officially scheduled for 10 to 4 p.m., but there were people lining up as
00:00:20.720 early as 8 in the morning. Due to the size of the lines, it took until 6 p.m. to collect all
00:00:27.240 signatures. Using Google Maps, we can see where the two tables are set up. Table 1 was on the east
00:00:35.080 side, and Table 2 was south of this junction. What I'm calling the junction is the point where
00:00:45.240 both lineups can be seen at once. At the westmost side is the parking lot and the food truck.
00:00:52.520 The lineup went all the way to the food truck. The distance between these two points is 350 meters.
00:01:03.640 We also know that Table 2 is about 50 meters from the junction.
00:01:08.600 So at the peak, there's about 400 meters of people lined up. So with even one person per meter,
00:01:16.440 that's 400 people in the line. With more than one person per meter, that's about 600 people in the line.
00:01:25.720 So with 10 people collecting signatures at one minute per signature, that's about 600 per hour.
00:01:33.960 At two minutes per signature, that's about 300 per hour. So if you factor the length of the lines
00:01:41.560 and the overall timeline, it's easy to estimate that over 3000 people attended.
00:01:48.600 Another observation was the traffic and the parking. At 2 p.m. there's a steady stream of cars driving in,
00:01:54.840 as well as cars leaving the parking lot. Since the parking lot was full, I had to hunt for a space.
00:02:01.640 What this shows is just how enthusiastic people were to sign. This is just the beginning,
00:02:11.960 and it'll be great to see what kind of turnouts we have in the upcoming events.
00:02:17.880 If you still need to sign, go to stayfreealberta.ca for up-to-date information on all official petition events.
00:02:26.440 Hopefully you found this helpful to fact check some of the claims floating around.
00:02:33.160 If you're curious, we did another short recap video,
00:02:35.960 as we interviewed the YAG team lead from Stay Free Alberta.
00:02:40.760 And don't forget to like and subscribe, as it helps us out and helps this channel grow.
00:02:45.800 Thank you for watching.