The Critical Compass Podcast - May 01, 2026


The Centurion Project： Engaging Citizens in the Political Process

Frances Widdowson ｜ The ＂Mass Graves＂ Lie & The Downfall of Universities Alberta Independence NEEDS Level Heads to Win

Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

160.21

Word count

3,048

Sentence count

164

People

Also mentioned:
Mitch Sylvester Janet Brown Goliath Menchie Tucker Marty David Leger Trump

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I speak at the launch of the Centurion Project, a new organization that is dedicated to fighting for an independent Scotland. I talk about the challenges we are facing and what we need to do to win the independence referendum.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 all right everyone well this is awesome we've got a full room we this is the launch of the
00:00:12.360 first meeting major meeting we've had a few house meetings of the Centurion project but I am back
00:00:19.240 and the reason that I am back is because I do not think that the current methods that we are using
00:00:25.260 will get us independence that's the truth I do not think that we are going to
00:00:30.960 get and and I want to say to start off with we all owe a great debt to Mitch
00:00:37.720 Sylvester a great debt I do not think that we can repay that debt because if
00:00:45.380 it was not for Mitch Sylvester there would be no independence referendum it
00:00:48.840 was not for him driving over 300,000 kilometers in his truck over the last
00:00:54.660 two and a half years and sometimes driving for five hours to see five
00:01:00.300 people in a room do you know how discouraging that is as someone who's
00:01:03.960 trying to rally people I do because I did that with TBA we we owe him a great
00:01:09.660 debt of gratitude and we owe the people who have got us here which is the
00:01:13.200 canvassers Marty's here but there's many I'm sure of you that were canvassers we
00:01:18.180 owe all of you a great debt of gratitude. So let's give them a round of applause.
00:01:25.260 None of this would be possible without you. So nothing that I'm about to say should in any way
00:01:31.140 discredit what has been done. However, we are not going to win independence with pop-ups and town
00:01:39.120 halls or door knocking or phone calling. All right, we're not going to. Because what we face
00:01:46.040 is every single institution against us, okay?
00:01:51.500 The media is against us.
00:01:54.060 The law schools are against us.
00:01:56.460 The judges are against us.
00:01:58.200 We're seeing that right now.
00:02:00.780 The UCP is against us.
00:02:04.060 You may not like to hear that,
00:02:05.300 but the Premier got up and said
00:02:06.840 that she is going to campaign for staying in Canada.
00:02:10.140 She wants us to stay in Canada, right?
00:02:13.840 Not only that, but we have the Liberal government
00:02:15.620 that's against us. We have the NDP in Alberta that's against us. We have the Liberal Party
00:02:21.620 in Alberta that's against us. We have the unions that are against us. So if there's ever been
00:02:27.800 a David and Goliath story, this is it. So I'm back because I think that we have something
00:02:36.320 that they don't.
00:02:39.120 We have each other.
00:02:41.540 Okay?
00:02:42.440 But politics has not been done
00:02:46.140 in a way that is good for people
00:02:48.520 in a long time.
00:02:50.300 Think about it.
00:02:51.280 If a random person that's a volunteer
00:02:53.260 comes to your door,
00:02:54.380 what is the odds that they're going to persuade you
00:02:55.860 to change your political views?
00:02:58.320 Zero.
00:02:59.420 Right?
00:02:59.780 I've never had someone knock on my door
00:03:01.420 that's changed my mind about anything.
00:03:03.280 Not even a vacuum salesman.
00:03:05.320 Right?
00:03:06.320 so the door knocking isn't going to work now everybody has one of these they can see who's
00:03:15.560 calling them right what are the odds you're going to answer a random phone call and have
00:03:20.080 your mind changed zero we can't hold enough town halls to reach the people that we need to reach
00:03:29.040 so we have a problem right now according to the polling we are somewhere between 28 and 38 percent
00:03:38.800 ECOS came out with a poll two days ago 38 percent support of independence and Leger and Janet Brown
00:03:45.660 came out 27 to 28 so let's put it in the middle let's say we're at 32 okay 32 percent of Albertans
00:03:53.460 is a million voting age Albertans we need to get to at least 1.5 but here's
00:04:01.500 the other problem not everybody votes the UK had their equivalent of what
00:04:06.840 we're about to do brexit the brexit referendum guess how what percentage of
00:04:11.140 people voted in that 72% 28% of people didn't even bother to vote on the
00:04:19.440 future of their country and it will be the same or worse here and that might
00:04:24.660 sound bad but that's actually very good news because guess what every single
00:04:32.940 independence supporter in this province is going to vote every single one and
00:04:38.580 how are we going to do it what are we going to do to make sure that happens
00:04:43.260 well I'll tell you we're not gonna do with phone calling we're not gonna do
00:04:45.400 door knocking we've already been there right you're going to do it the people of alberta
00:04:51.560 are going to make this happen but of course the question is how and that is why we've created
00:04:59.400 the centurion project the centurion project is based on a philosophy and the philosophy
00:05:05.800 is simple it's actually very very very old it is the philosophy of the romans and the greeks and
00:05:11.720 and it is the idea that citizenship is not a right, it is a responsibility.
00:05:17.620 The Romans had an election every single year.
00:05:22.380 Every year.
00:05:23.980 And you went through a cycle as a Roman citizen,
00:05:27.200 and when it came your turn, you got elected and you were the judge for that year.
00:05:31.340 Your job was to judge disputes between your fellow citizens.
00:05:35.940 They took citizenship incredibly seriously.
00:05:39.480 In fact, as a citizen, it was your job every year to go and vote.
00:05:45.600 And if you didn't, you lost your citizenship.
00:05:48.600 You had to be engaged. You had to be involved.
00:05:51.860 Right now, in Red Deer, 21% of people bothered to vote in the municipal election.
00:06:00.360 21%.
00:06:00.880 That means if you were in a room with 10 people, only two bothered.
00:06:05.340 Think about that.
00:06:06.320 if only 10% of us had gone out and voted,
00:06:11.340 we would have every single municipality outside of Edmonton and Calgary.
00:06:15.440 And the right way, the way to win this is not to find a leader.
00:06:22.760 Stop putting your faith in leaders.
00:06:26.080 Stop putting your trust in other people.
00:06:29.200 Because they are not here to save you.
00:06:32.160 That is the truth.
00:06:34.080 You know what?
00:06:34.960 it's really easy to blame other people for your problems because then you don't have to take
00:06:39.580 responsibility for them. So what do we do about it? Well, you're going to have to become better
00:06:45.240 citizens. That's it. And the Centurion Project is my gift to you on how to do that. So I'll
00:06:54.820 explain a little bit. I've done 49 election campaigns now. So I've been doing this for 22
00:07:00.740 two years. Your ideas don't matter in politics as much as you think people are what matter in
00:07:08.100 politics. So I'm going to teach you all to become little organizers. You're going to become the
00:07:16.400 organizers of something you already have. Something you've been developing all your life that exists
00:07:23.080 and will take very little effort from you because it's something that you've built.
00:07:26.400 your network you see one of the great lies of the modern world is the lie of an individuality
00:07:35.180 that you are some little individual that just exists in the universe you're not you're the
00:07:42.040 node in the center of a network of relationships you can all have you all have family members
00:07:47.940 some of you have children some of you have grandchildren some of you have co-workers
00:07:52.340 cousins, friends, and all you need to do to make independence happen is take those people
00:08:01.360 and take responsibility for them. Okay? Say, my wife, my husband, my parents, my cousins,
00:08:11.200 I'm going to find out where they stand on independence. And then I'm going to try to
00:08:17.420 persuade the ones that don't support it, and I am going to get the ones who do support it to vote.
00:08:23.880 That's the whole project. That's all you need to do. Now, you might say, well, that sounds a little
00:08:29.080 daunting. Well, that's why we've made the Centurion Project, okay? So, what is the Centurion Project?
00:08:35.380 Well, if you sign up at thecenturionproject.ca, one of our Centurions, we now have 500,
00:08:41.360 will contact you and get you onboarded.
00:08:44.480 Onboarded means you go on to our website,
00:08:47.500 you log in and you search for the people you know
00:08:50.120 and you claim them.
00:08:51.700 That's it.
00:08:52.860 And then you will have a list of who you know
00:08:55.340 and then the only thing we ask you to do with that
00:08:58.100 is survey them and find out if they support independence or not.
00:09:01.560 That's it.
00:09:02.900 And once you've identified that,
00:09:05.080 you keep that list
00:09:06.120 and once we get close to the referendum,
00:09:09.140 your job is to get them to vote.
00:09:11.360 door knocking. How many people here have door knocked before? Okay. Would it be fair to say
00:09:19.080 that a good door knocker can hit 20 to 25 doors in an hour? Does everyone agree with that?
00:09:25.060 And how many of those doors would get answered? Half? Maybe less? And I mean, if you're a pretty
00:09:32.340 girl, more doors get answered if you're not, less do. That's just the truth. But if you're lucky, 0.96
00:09:37.940 an hour of door knocking will result in three to four IDs so an hour of your
00:09:44.060 time gets you three to four I know this for a fact phone calling currently the
00:09:50.960 cost of an ID is $12 when you sign up for the Centurion project it will take
00:09:58.380 you less than 15 minutes to identify 10 people that's worth at least two hours
00:10:05.360 probably closer to five hours of door knocking and it is worth a hundred and
00:10:10.100 twenty dollars to the independence movement okay this is the most
00:10:16.280 effective way I have ever come across to win a campaign and I'm gonna give you
00:10:23.660 one more interesting piece of data so I got this idea long ago I was like in
00:10:30.080 fact if any of you guys write my speeches when I went around the province before
00:10:33.380 for the 2023 election, what did I say?
00:10:35.620 I said, find 10 people, get them to vote.
00:10:38.820 If they're a young person, they're worth,
00:10:40.820 you know, if they've never voted before,
00:10:42.960 I said all these things, right?
00:10:44.080 And I said, if you get an NDP person to switch,
00:10:46.060 that's worth two, right?
00:10:49.140 But here's the thing, I was saying that
00:10:50.620 and I had no idea if any of you did it, right?
00:10:54.580 Now we have a way of accountability.
00:10:59.100 But more than that, I can't see who you claim.
00:11:03.380 even I, who made this whole product, I can't see who you claim.
00:11:07.260 Only you know who you claimed.
00:11:09.820 It's your list.
00:11:11.160 It belongs to you.
00:11:13.660 None of the admins, nobody who has control of the site,
00:11:17.620 nobody in Alberta can see who you've claimed.
00:11:20.180 It's your list.
00:11:21.080 You take responsibility for it.
00:11:23.580 But the people that created this technology,
00:11:27.120 I met them on the Tucker Tour in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
00:11:30.260 and they were a sponsor.
00:11:31.480 They put $50,000 into the VIP so that they could promote their app.
00:11:36.820 And when I first heard about it, I was so blown away that I used every piece of social capital that I had with Tucker to get him to endorse it on stage.
00:11:44.300 He endorsed it on stage.
00:11:45.700 They tracked what he did, like how many people signed up.
00:11:49.080 And it resulted in 86,000 people who were non-voters, so people who voted less than 50% in elections voting.
00:11:56.300 And if you go look at the margin that Trump got, it was not very far off that in Michigan.
00:12:04.400 It was blown away.
00:12:05.940 It was blown away by what this can do.
00:12:08.040 But there's a few other things that are important.
00:12:11.580 We are going into an age where people are going to trust what's going on in the Internet less and less.
00:12:18.240 Okay?
00:12:19.120 AI slop is everywhere now.
00:12:22.080 People aren't even writing their own posts.
00:12:24.140 people are losing faith in the digital world we are moving to a place where
00:12:29.960 people are going to want to be gathering together and they're going to care more
00:12:34.200 about their relationships and they're not going to trust the things they're
00:12:37.400 seeing or reading online because they could have been completely made up and
00:12:42.260 in that world how are political parties and political movements going to reach
00:12:48.320 people they're not going to reach them over the phone they're not going to
00:12:52.040 reach them over the door, and they're lost social media. They're going to reach them through you.
00:12:58.800 The future of politics, I say this as someone who's been campaigning my whole life,
00:13:03.960 is interpersonal campaigning, which means you taking responsibility for the people in your life.
00:13:12.280 You getting the message to them. If you want to have a say in what that nation looks like,
00:13:19.160 You have to show up.
00:13:21.040 You have to do the work.
00:13:22.620 But here's the thing.
00:13:24.280 A lot of you have families.
00:13:25.320 A lot of you have jobs.
00:13:26.280 You're busy.
00:13:27.440 You've got a lot going on.
00:13:28.900 You don't have a lot of time.
00:13:30.880 We need 15 minutes.
00:13:34.320 If you give 15 minutes of your time, you will have done more than people who go out door knocking and phone calling.
00:13:41.040 because the odds that if you call someone you know
00:13:45.020 and tell them to vote, that they'll vote
00:13:46.640 is about four to five times higher
00:13:50.760 than if a random person calls them.
00:13:54.040 But on top of that, let's say you're like,
00:13:57.140 you know what, I want to put more than 15 minutes
00:13:59.340 into the independence movement.
00:14:01.920 Well, then you can become an ambassador
00:14:04.280 of the Centurion Project,
00:14:06.160 and all that means is you get your own link
00:14:08.100 that you can send to people, and they sign up,
00:14:10.160 and you see that they sign up.
00:14:11.440 You can't see who they've claimed.
00:14:12.980 It's not a multi-level marketing company.
00:14:15.380 You don't get points for how many people you've signed up.
00:14:19.560 But if you sign up 10 people,
00:14:22.980 on average, when a person signs up,
00:14:25.520 they claim 14 people and they do 10 surveys.
00:14:29.420 So you getting 10 people means that you 10x what you've done.
00:14:35.540 Okay?
00:14:36.540 And then, if you want to go even further,
00:14:38.820 and I'm looking for this tonight.
00:14:40.460 So come up to me afterwards, put on these meetings
00:14:44.320 because we're not going to just get enough people
00:14:49.380 by going online or sending out emails
00:14:53.080 or doing texts or door knocking or anything.
00:14:55.520 The only way that we're going to get the number of people
00:14:58.600 that we need using this app to get the IDs that we need
00:15:02.200 is if you invite your friends to hear about it.
00:15:05.760 Now, don't invite all your friends.
00:15:07.800 This is not a persuasion campaign at this point. This is the people you know who want independence
00:15:13.640 right people you know and here's the thing it sounds like more than 300 000 Albertans have
00:15:21.400 signed the petition for independence 300 000 right it might be higher i don't know we'll
00:15:27.080 find out on monday right but 300 000 people is a lot of people in order to pull this off
00:15:34.840 By September, we need 18,900 on this app.
00:15:40.000 If we have 18,900 people, all they will have to do is each recruit 10,
00:15:46.660 and we will identify 1.89 million Albertans,
00:15:50.760 and with that, we should be able to identify the full number of people that we need.
00:15:55.500 That's the plan.
00:15:56.320 It's very simple.
00:15:57.520 If you go on the app, you're going to realize just how easy it is,
00:16:00.680 and we can do it.
00:16:02.780 It will work.
00:16:04.300 The only way it works, though, is if you do your part.
00:16:07.260 I can't survey $1.89 million.
00:16:10.000 The cost of that over the phone would be over $13 million.
00:16:15.360 Now, that doesn't mean that you can't be part of other groups.
00:16:18.700 You don't have to be only loyal to the Centurion Project, okay?
00:16:22.380 You don't have to be only loyal to APP or only loyal to State Free Alberta either. 0.99
00:16:27.780 The left has never been so stupid as to say we only need one group. 0.98
00:16:33.140 They have a group for everything. 1.00
00:16:35.280 They have a group for animal rights.
00:16:37.780 They have a group for the environment. 0.94
00:16:39.200 They have the group for the alphabet people.
00:16:40.840 They have a group for everything, right?
00:16:43.860 Why do we think on the right, well, we should only have one group?
00:16:48.100 Why can't we just have one leader?
00:16:51.300 The left doesn't do that, and that's why they're winning.
00:16:56.640 We are lazy, and we just want one person to tell us what to do
00:17:01.340 because we actually don't care about politics.
00:17:02.800 We care about family and our businesses and our lives.
00:17:05.820 We just want to live, right?
00:17:08.660 They truly believe what they believe.
00:17:11.700 They are not the majority anywhere.
00:17:15.460 But they're better organized than we are.
00:17:17.420 And the reason they're better organized
00:17:18.700 isn't because they have some great leader.
00:17:20.280 Do you really think Menchie's some great leader?
00:17:23.680 Have you seen how his face looks lately?
00:17:26.000 Like the guy, he can't even lead himself.
00:17:29.440 Right?
00:17:29.880 no it's because they have so many groups that it trains people to be organized so
00:17:37.240 get out of your head this idea that there should only be one organization
00:17:40.620 and you can only be loyal to one organization that your identity has to
00:17:43.680 be attached to one organization but also this takes 15 minutes you could do this
00:17:50.340 at night on your phone I sometimes just sit there and I'm like oh I just talked
00:17:53.340 to that person boom click claimed surveyed right and usually if you know
00:17:59.340 the person, you already know where they stand. You don't even have to ask them. Right? Take
00:18:07.800 responsibility. Because citizenship has lost its value, and that's why we are where we are.
00:18:16.260 So that's what the Centurion Project is about. I want to be clear, the Centurion Project is not
00:18:20.880 ending when independence ends. We want to build communities all over this province and teach
00:18:24.880 people to be better citizens. This is just the tool or the project or the mission that we're on
00:18:32.420 right now. And I find that people learn best when they're doing things. If you just vote and then
00:18:39.580 think, well, now we're an independent country, everything's going to be better. Things will get
00:18:44.500 worse. But if you become citizens and you take your society seriously and your role as a citizen,
00:18:53.940 as a responsibility, everything will change.
00:18:57.780 That's what the Centurion Project is all about.
00:18:59.760 So thank you for your time.
00:19:00.500 Thank you.