The Critical Compass Podcast - April 10, 2026


Ottawa Has Gone From Not Helping, to Interfering, to Downright Threatening Alberta ｜ Martyupnorth


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

177.54982

Word count

1,800

Sentence count

96

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 So why did I become a separatist?
00:00:07.000 Full disclosure, I'm from Ontario, graduated engineering in 1989.
00:00:12.000 The economy was tough in Ontario and I moved out west.
00:00:16.000 Going through school, I had the opportunity to come work here.
00:00:19.000 They're called co-op terms, so I worked in Slave Lake
00:00:22.000 and I worked in Burstall, Saskatchewan.
00:00:24.000 And when I graduated, I accepted a job out west.
00:00:28.000 I accepted a job in Fox Creek, Alberta.
00:00:30.780 And so I packed all my stuff, landed in Fox Creek, and life was good.
00:00:35.800 So I started my career in Fox Creek in 89, 90.
00:00:40.280 And typical, you know, future so bright, everything was going good for me.
00:00:45.200 I was working my butt off and progressing through the ranks in the oil patch.
00:00:49.980 And I'll never forget this either.
00:00:52.120 When I got there and we were drilling wells and stuff like that,
00:00:55.860 the guys told me, Marty, don't get too settled, because this oil will be gone soon, and you'll
00:01:01.260 need to move along. Well, that was 35 years ago, and we saw what happened in the Strait of Hormuz
00:01:05.840 right now, so oil's here to stay. But anyways, so I worked my career, I started progressing,
00:01:11.900 everything was good, and if you ask, and right now you guys think I'm political, but I don't
00:01:15.640 want to be political. I mean, I'm basically retired now, I'd like nothing more than just
00:01:19.920 be left alone, but I have to take on the fight right now, because there's an existential fight,
00:01:25.860 on our hands. Ottawa doesn't like us. So I'm progressing through the ranks. I'm moving up
00:01:30.700 as an engineer. And if you ask Marty in around 2004, you're paying extra taxes. They're going
00:01:37.360 to Ottawa and they're being wasted. What do you think about that? As a typical Albertan,
00:01:41.200 I would have said, I don't care. I'm doing my part for Canada. We're over contributing. So what?
00:01:46.820 My kids are playing hockey. I got a nice truck. The house is on its way to being paid off. And I
00:01:51.960 got gas for the sled. So I didn't care. And I continued moving like that until about 2012,
00:02:00.320 13, 14, right? So we remember in 2014, we had that first downturn in the economy and
00:02:05.460 the oil dipped down to $14 a barrel and it got a little hard for us. But anybody who'd been in
00:02:10.440 Alberta for a long time knew that this is just another cycle. It's no big deal, right?
00:02:15.020 And what did we do as Albertans? Well, when the price of oil is down like that, we build
00:02:20.340 infrastructure and we get ready for the upturn and so we wanted to build
00:02:23.640 infrastructure we wanted to build a couple of pipelines and remember we've
00:02:26.700 been basically paying extra taxes to Ottawa all this time and we think of it
00:02:30.720 as sort of an insurance policy right so the economy is taking a downturn we call
00:02:34.860 on Ottawa's like hey can you lend us a hand and we weren't even asking for
00:02:39.120 physical for monetary hand we're just like hey we need to build a couple of
00:02:43.680 pipelines we belong to this thing called confederation we're supposed to help
00:02:46.620 each other as provinces so can we get a pipeline built energy east to the east or can we get one
00:02:53.020 to the west can we get something and ottawa said no they blocked us right so like okay well that's
00:02:58.940 a little disappointing but what do we do as albertans we put our heads down and we just
00:03:03.420 kept on going and we worked and and then all of a sudden 2014 and 15 comes around and then trudeau
00:03:09.420 gets elected and nodley gets elected and not only are they not helping us but now they're starting
00:03:14.700 to hinder us, interfere.
00:03:17.240 So, you know, they want to pass carbon taxes
00:03:19.440 and they want to pass, you know,
00:03:21.240 they want to block our trade.
00:03:22.640 They want us to build a grid that's net zero.
00:03:25.000 They want us to drive electric vehicles.
00:03:27.080 They want us to do things that we don't agree with.
00:03:29.640 Because of the way Confederation is designed,
00:03:31.960 and you've heard Keith and others talk about this,
00:03:34.920 we'll never get our say in this
00:03:36.440 because they outnumber us.
00:03:38.320 Tanya said it, right?
00:03:39.120 60% of the population lives in Ontario and Quebec.
00:03:41.400 So it doesn't matter even if we had
00:03:43.040 a proportionate kind of representation, they outnumber us and they have silly ideas. So they're
00:03:49.900 interfering, but then the interference goes to a next step. Now they're actually trying to push us
00:03:55.540 down and they're trying to take away things that are really important to us, like our property
00:03:59.980 rights. They want to take away our firearms. They want to do things that they've gone from not
00:04:04.200 helping to interfering to downright threatening us. And for me, that was an absolute awakening
00:04:12.520 and I became a diehard separatist.
00:04:16.920 I almost thought that we might,
00:04:18.900 I got worried because I thought,
00:04:20.540 okay, maybe Trudeau was helping us,
00:04:22.840 our movement,
00:04:23.380 I thought, ooh, maybe the next guy
00:04:25.060 will interfere and do something nice
00:04:27.700 because I've always been worried
00:04:28.820 that they might do something temporarily nice
00:04:31.200 because we've tried long-term solutions, right?
00:04:33.020 We've tried the Meach Lake Accord
00:04:34.440 and all those things
00:04:35.120 and I thought, ooh,
00:04:36.280 we might get a guy here
00:04:37.200 who will cancel the equalization payments.
00:04:41.240 well, Kearney got elected. And ask anybody on the APP, the day after Kearney got elected,
00:04:47.480 we signed up like, what, Keith, hundreds of thousands of volunteers and people who pledged.
00:04:52.380 Kearney is the best salesman for independence that we've ever had. I'm running out of time here,
00:04:57.280 but I want to tell you a real one quick story personally, because you guys are, you know,
00:05:01.300 you guys know me as an influencer, but I did have a pretty cool career. I did work for some
00:05:06.240 big major oil companies. I was the director of pipelines for TransCanada, and I worked for a
00:05:12.220 company called Paraday trying to advance a project in Nova Scotia, an LNG project. And I want to talk
00:05:17.720 about it because of what happened last week. And I'm bound by these confidentiality agreements,
00:05:21.480 but I don't care. I'm going to tell you a story. So in 2013, we sold LNG worth $35 billion
00:05:29.760 dollars to the German government okay and we signed the deal quietly in Halifax without fanfare
00:05:36.620 and that's the way the Germans wanted it because admitting that they were buying LNG from us was
00:05:42.600 an admission that their transition to green had failed miserably so we did the deal 35 billion
00:05:49.520 dollars 10 20 years worth of natural gas 10 million metric tons per year and the deal was
00:05:56.500 so important to the Germans that they gave us loan guarantees worth $4.5 billion. They wanted
00:06:02.340 this to happen. So we did the engineering. We spent $100 million. We wasted three years of my
00:06:08.340 life advancing this project, getting the preliminary design done. I got a whole bunch of permits. I was
00:06:13.160 ready to start construction. I just needed some money, right? Part of our plan was to go borrow
00:06:18.580 a large amount of money. As we were getting ready to borrow that money, the German government asked
00:06:23.960 for something pretty reasonable. They said, before we give you this loan guarantee or you exercise it,
00:06:29.920 we'd like some assurances from your government that they're on board with this. So we tried
00:06:34.800 getting letters from various levels of government to show support for this. Trudeau wouldn't give
00:06:41.300 us a letter, right? And you know after the fact that the Chancellor of Germany came back two,
00:06:45.740 three times, but Trudeau wouldn't give us a letter of support. I didn't get the letter from him. I
00:06:50.660 didn't get a letter from Nova Scotia. Actually, ironically, the only person who gave me a letter,
00:06:56.380 and I still have the letter at home, was Rachel Notley. Because the way we were going to get the
00:07:02.140 gas was we were going to get gas from Alberta all the way to Nova Scotia. It's a, it's a torturous
00:07:06.580 path. We can get there, but at least some, and I have that letter at home, and I'm sure that they
00:07:11.160 have, if Rachel Notley doesn't know, she signed that letter, right? Some, some deputy minister
00:07:16.420 probably slipped it on on her desk she signed it I have it I used it it was for nothing in the end
00:07:23.620 it was for nothing because we couldn't get the money and the reason we couldn't get the money
00:07:27.440 is we were meeting big banks from Malaysia from from all over the world and you have no idea how
00:07:33.640 frustrating it is to be in a meeting with one of those big banks and be told that you're too risky
00:07:38.220 love your project but Canada is too risky so in 2016-17 we were perceived by the rest of the world
00:07:45.720 as a banana republic. In fact, I use the word banana all the time. To me, you've heard of
00:07:50.600 nimbyism, not in my backyard. In Canada, it's banana. Build absolutely nothing anywhere near 0.90
00:07:56.180 anything. And we did that to ourselves. Our government did that to ourselves. But this is
00:08:01.380 just an example that I want to reinforce. There's a bunch of reasons why we need to separate. It's
00:08:07.080 to protect ourselves. It's to protect our future. It's for economic reasons. But at the end of the
00:08:13.780 day, anybody who thinks we're going to change Ottawa's mind, we're not. It's been tried. It'll
00:08:19.360 never happen. They don't think like us. They don't like us. In fact, I'm pretty sure they want to keep
00:08:24.580 the resources in the ground until we're gone, and then they'll exploit the resources. But just my
00:08:29.560 call to action, please. Yes, I think this phase is pretty easy. We have amazing people. Who here
00:08:36.760 is a canvasser? Oh, my God, look at that. All right. Thank you for doing that. So we have
00:08:42.060 amazing canvassers i think we will have enough signatures to trigger the referendum but the real
00:08:47.680 battle the real battle is after the the the referendum is is is started it's the campaign
00:08:56.660 so from you know from june until october that's the battle and that's my call to action is
00:09:02.300 take something away from this bring people even if you've been here before and you are supporting
00:09:08.300 this bring somebody who's not on board yet and take away some things reach out to us if you want
00:09:13.780 to organize events if you want us to speak there if you need talking points but we everybody here
00:09:18.080 needs to bring one person to one of these events so otherwise thanks for coming out folks and we'll
00:09:22.340 be around
00:09:38.300 Thank you.