The Critical Compass Podcast - June 14, 2026


Why Can't Alberta Have the Same Quality of Life as Other Oil-Rich Nations？ ｜ Mitch Sylvestre

Mentioned
Dennis Kalma Mitch
Mitch Sylvestre RESPONDS to Charlie Angus Claims of Foreign Interference & Treason in Alberta Mitch Sylvestre ｜ Petition Debrief & Looking Ahead to the Referendum

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

164.39

Word count

1,761

Sentence count

68

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I sit down with former Prime Minister and current Finance Minister, Irwin Cotterill, to discuss the current state of Alberta's economy and the state of the country as a whole. We talk about the current economic situation in Alberta, the current political climate, and the future of the province.

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 .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 when you're when you're having to contend with um questioning your entire life's belief systems up
00:00:08.720 to a certain point it's actually quite a painful thing for a lot of people and i i often wonder
00:00:13.580 like you know you're exactly right people want to say like oh you know you're just making this
00:00:18.380 about money you guys are just greedy but absolutely right you know the response from what we're seeing
00:00:23.540 from these groups emerging on the left now uh ndp adjacent groups and you know former uh you know
00:00:29.360 Liberal cabinet members and stuff is all about the money aspect. They just are attempting to
00:00:35.580 refute our claims and say that actually, this is risky. Actually, businesses will pull out
00:00:40.900 of the province. Actually, this, actually that. But it does end up ultimately coming down to a
00:00:45.380 monetary issue. I wonder for the people in your life, Mitch, that maybe are a little more left
00:00:52.860 leaning or were left leaning and are having to kind of contend with, you know, well, actually,
00:00:56.820 canada isn't quite what we uh thought it was or what you know what it used to be or we're nostalgic
00:01:03.140 for a country that no longer exists do you kind of have something maybe other than the money aspect
00:01:08.420 maybe a a cultural aspect or some some sort of response like that that you would say to those
00:01:13.380 people to try and kind of wake them up i guess uh to to the reality that we're dealing with well
00:01:19.140 that's really hard to do right it's really hard to to wake people up to to that reality and i i
00:01:24.820 still have one holdout in my family. I've got all the rest on my side of this. But the one
00:01:31.060 particular lady daughter-in-law that I have, I don't like to talk politics at the house because 0.98
00:01:37.700 I'm not talking politics 24-7. I said to her, I said, you know, I'm going to ask you a question
00:01:44.740 because they're both professionals, her and him. I said, if you guys ended up with
00:01:51.300 with $2,000 net more money a month, would that be enough to convince you to support our side of this?"
00:01:59.300 And she said, absolutely.
00:02:02.300 We're seeing, even though we're both professionals with three little kids,
00:02:08.300 that we have to be more careful than we've ever had to be.
00:02:13.300 They own their own home, they're both professionals, they both have a vehicle,
00:02:17.300 so they're not broke by any stretch of the imagination.
00:02:21.300 But now what's happening is they're seeing that their taxes are continuing to go up.
00:02:26.060 And the funniest thing is that we're seeing that in our lives.
00:02:30.200 I mean, the two retired people, my wife and I,
00:02:32.380 and my wife's still working full-time running the business,
00:02:34.060 but when we pay, our paycheck doesn't go as far as it went two or three years ago,
00:02:40.200 and we're clearly seeing it because we're in a position where we're both collecting pensions,
00:02:44.400 so there's a max to how much we can take out of that business,
00:02:47.100 and so we clearly see what we can end up with after all that's done.
00:02:51.300 And it's not what it was three or four years ago.
00:02:55.680 And we're seeing everything go up all over the place.
00:02:59.740 It's just crazy what's going on.
00:03:02.140 And we're wondering how people are affording it.
00:03:06.340 How are people affording to do this?
00:03:09.200 And the funniest thing for me is I have a friend that went to the Premier's entourage,
00:03:15.080 and he went to Dubai with them.
00:03:18.340 And he said, I hate to say this out loud, but holy crow, we should look at a monarchy.
00:03:24.680 These guys are paying no tax, federal or provincial.
00:03:28.700 They get a check every month from the government, and their health care system is absolutely
00:03:37.740 awesome and not crowded like ours.
00:03:41.040 The whole system there is completely different than what we have going on.
00:03:45.420 And so why can't we do that for Alberta?
00:03:48.220 we have more than them. We have as much oil as them. We can produce as much oil as them.
00:03:53.760 If they're producing 11 million barrels of oil a day, we can produce 11 million barrels
00:03:56.800 of oil a day. Absolutely we can. We can sell natural gas. We've got trillions and trillions
00:04:01.600 of units of natural gas to sell. But in addition to that, we have farming. We have forestry.
00:04:08.660 We have all manner of things here. We have tons of fresh water. We're one of the richest
00:04:13.900 land masses anywhere in the world, and yet the government that we have has been spending
00:04:18.660 the last 10 years literally sabotaging industry.
00:04:21.560 And there's another thing, I never ever thought in my lifetime that I would ever see a Canadian
00:04:27.100 government trying to hurt its own people.
00:04:30.460 And that's just what they're doing.
00:04:31.680 I mean, through COVID and now through policy to shut us in and stop us.
00:04:37.480 What happens when we lose that kind of investment and when they try to shut down the oil patch
00:04:43.460 is is for future generations and for people coming up when we were growing up there was you know as
00:04:49.860 a 20 year old and this happened a bit back in those days where girls got pregnant in high school
00:04:56.500 and they ended up getting married and but the thing of it was is that back in those days you
00:05:01.620 could stay home as a mom and your husband could go out as a 20 year old and buy a house so that
00:05:08.260 you could live in a house with the baby and stay home and have the rest of your babies and then go
00:05:11.860 to work or whatever was required after that that's impossible today that's impossible today
00:05:18.020 so so that's the benchmark for me looking at how how that is is working out and now i'm seeing
00:05:23.860 you know my son the elder phone phone me the other day and said since when is you know 120
00:05:28.580 an hour not enough to live on because i mean they that's what they get paid and then they
00:05:31.780 got to take all their expenses and all the rest of that i says it's it's a it's a brand new reality
00:05:36.820 for people. These guys work 12 hours a day in the dead of winter, laying on their back
00:05:42.660 welding pipe. It's not as if it's a glamorous job, but it's a well-paying job. But the whole
00:05:47.780 thing is that if they're no longer developing and are no longer pulling that resource out
00:05:53.140 of the ground, then as a consequence to that, it takes away opportunity from our people, 0.75
00:05:58.100 and they're hauling out the middle class on us is what they're doing. As a consequence to that, 0.87
00:06:02.980 you know, at some point, they're going to accomplish what they're doing for sure.
00:06:07.780 And there's going to be two classes of people here, and a lot of poor people and a very few rich people.
00:06:13.140 And that's what I'm afraid of, and that's what I don't want for Alberta and Albertans.
00:06:18.080 Yeah, it's not about the money until people are struggling to live, and then they realize, well, money at this point is changing their lives.
00:06:30.780 And if they, if their money evaporates year to year, that is like, how do you look forward to the future? How do you plan 10 years ahead, 20 years ahead? How do you raise a family? You don't know how much your dollar is worth.
00:06:45.800 So part of what makes this so difficult is that when you unpack these ideas with people, especially with people that are already stressed, they're busy, they don't have the cognitive space to dive deep into all these different topics.
00:07:06.420 but to really understand this you have to well talk about confederation you have to talk about
00:07:11.460 the cultural elements talk about the economy you have to talk about well what about what's
00:07:16.740 our constitution like what could it be what's our monetary policy like why has fiat currency
00:07:23.860 existed in the way that it has over the last 50 years and that's a lot to unpack but um so
00:07:32.340 So even with some of my friends and family, I'll chip away at a couple of those ideas.
00:07:38.780 Depends who they are.
00:07:40.760 And I realize our podcast is not going to be watched by people primarily that are on the fence.
00:07:48.900 It's going to be people that are watching it and then maybe learning something and then reaching out to maybe friends and family.
00:07:55.140 And they're going to take what they've learned or some of the ideas that we've unpacked and they're going to propagate that.
00:08:02.340 within their circle. One thing that comes up is I hear this idea that they'll say, well,
00:08:09.020 the UCP is corrupt or these guys are corrupt. And you get from all sides, you have this
00:08:14.420 common theme that government is bloated and corrupt, but it's usually that they're just
00:08:20.940 saying their team's the good ones and the other team's the bad guys. And my biggest question to
00:08:27.180 that is, if that is true, if what you're saying is true, then why are we in a system that enables
00:08:34.600 that level of corruption? Wouldn't this be a great opportunity to revise the system in a way
00:08:41.900 that puts strict limits on bureaucratic bloat, spending, all these things that you are saying
00:08:52.280 that it is currently corrupt.
00:08:53.900 So I think that's a big point
00:08:56.200 that can be made with anybody
00:08:57.380 without disagreeing with them
00:08:59.060 because you can say,
00:09:00.080 yes, given what you say is true,
00:09:02.640 what does that mean
00:09:03.420 for Alberta independence?
00:09:05.320 And then the same thing is
00:09:06.520 that will go hand in hand
00:09:08.700 with the Constitutional Convention.
00:09:10.160 So I think the work that
00:09:11.480 Dennis Kelma is doing
00:09:13.400 and then the newly formed
00:09:16.180 Alberta Transition Council
00:09:17.560 just laying out,
00:09:19.340 giving some legitimacy to people who are interested about there being like a solid
00:09:26.120 plan or having these ideas kind of structured in a way that we can discuss. But when I was born,
00:09:35.060 I had zero opportunity to engage in a constitutional convention for our own
00:09:42.760 constitution and this is a unique opportunity now so um i i think those are a couple things worth
00:09:50.440 if we were trying to like steer away from just the money argument or if we've exhausted that
00:09:57.060 in a conversation these are some other avenues um that i i feel like are almost
00:10:02.400 as or even more important when it comes to what an independent alberta will be
00:10:12.760 Transcription by CastingWords