Canada’s Cowboy Calvinism and the Polyester Gospel
The Republic of the Self-Inflicted Wound
It wasn’t the man himself that hit me first, but the hat, an obscene little crown of polyester tyranny, lopsided and ridiculous, perched on hair so white it looked irradiated, powdered with asbestos and the dust of biblical plagues. The brim was cocked at an impossible angle, transmitting on a frequency only lunatics and dogs could hear. It didn’t whisper, it shrieked: entitled.
This wasn’t the sharp, clean oversized baseball caps with flat brims you see in Major League highlight reels these days, the kind that swagger straight off the TV and into Europe’s smug idea of North American excess. No, this was the bastard child of a 1990s used-car-lot giveaway: puff-front polyester, cheap mesh backing, and the faint, sweaty aura of desperation and homeliness baked into every fiber. A cap that didn’t just sit on his head, but broadcast in AM radio static: “I am not like the others.”
The man beneath the relic was almost invisible in his uniform of defeat: a slightly ruffled short-sleeved plaid shirt, shapeless grey trousers, the white man’s cell phone holster clipped to his belt, and of course, the inevitable comfortable walking shoes. He could have been anywhere from sixty-five to one hundred and forty, a plastic straw relic spat up by time in a Tim Hortons. A monument to a forgotten war, erected on a foundation of cheap coffee and cheaper rhetoric. That is if it weren’t for his erratic body language which consisted of sharp, convulsive jolts, like he was fighting off the urge to rip open the sky and demand justice from God or in his absence, a Timmie’s representative at corporate HQ back east.
His muttering rose above the crinkled donut bags and the sticky massacre of spilled, flavorless coffee on the counter. Each syllable a low-voltage shock to the crowded lineup of road-weary Canadians shuffling for their next fix of caffeine and sugar before heading back out on the still patchily two-lane TransCanada highway.
The circle slowly began to widen around him, customers pulling back, careful not to meet the batshit crazy in his eyes, pretending to study their receipts like scripture while the air around us curdled. I could feel it too, that gravitational push, like the crowd was peeling back from the aftermath of an ugly traffic accident, and I was the only lunatic dumb enough to edge closer. Here was a reluctant prophet, an Albertan Jonah cornered between a Timbits display and an overflowing trash bin, channeling some private archangel, half Gabriel, half Fox News static, who never stop barking contradictory scripture into his brainstem. But where others recoiled, I leaned in, curiously compelled to catch the gospel dribbling from his spittle cracked lips.
A few recognizable words in and I quickly realized that this savior’s particular bent was much less Sermon on the Mount and much more MAGA manual. “Bloody immigrants,” he spat, trembling with divine entitlement from his personal Jesus. “What do these brown people know about coffee?” he inchoately fumed as he continued with his ironic remarks centering on how he had arrived first but was being served last because his uniform surely identified him as being a ‘real’ Canadian. The triage-based numbering system was out of his grasp and he just couldn’t accept the globalist Trudeauean injustice of others, in particular those of a darker shade, being served before him.
For a moment, just a flash, his face crumpled not in anger, but in the raw confusion of a child left behind. Then the moment passed. Each passing to-go cup stenciled with a kaleidoscope of different names was a personal betrayal. Every Diego, Mohammed, Imani and Amina was another Judas, another Brutus, another stabbing knife from a multicultural barista cabal. As more and more people with simpler orders filed past him to pick up their double doubles, he became more and more incensed. Each accent-tinged young voice from behind the counter calling out successive orders that weren’t his seemed to bury him further under his obvious unimportance.
This male Karen was Ken, Kevin, Kyle and Chad all rolled up in a mix of doublethink Postmedia hymnal. The supposed “diversity” of media like the Edmonton Sun and the Edmonton Journal is nothing but a corporate ventriloquist act—the same hand shoved up two different newspaper puppets’ behinds, flapping their jaws with identical talking points, while their parent company’s executives carve the news like meatloaf, seasoning it with the same recycled bile. It’s a conjurer’s trick: wave one paper in the left hand, another in the right, and behind the curtain the same executive ghoul is pulling the strings, stamping out headlines like endless fenceposts hammered into permafrost, all pointing the same direction.
And as I squinted at the relic of his cap, half-expecting it to conceal blunt-force trauma, a tin-foil lining or alien implants, the message finally resolved—not just a logo, but the entire sermon of my home province stitched in polyester. A gospel of distance. A declaration of exile. This wasn’t some ad for Al Peck’s Pre-Loved Oldsmobiles, but it might as well have been.
I was born and raised in Alberta, baptized in black ice and the exoticism of the Olive Garden. I experienced garlic as witchcraft and oregano a communist plot. Prairie food culture back then was imbued with the entrenched idea that anything spicier than black pepper was an open act of treason. I lived through its freezing winters, so dark you forget the sun was ever more than a rumor, cold so sharp it bites through denim jean jackets like a steel trap. I am brutally aware of the resilience needed to withstand such a pitiless climate.
I’m also familiar with the sense of isolation you feel as a prairie dweller, the kind of cosmic isolation where even in Edmonton—oil towers burning like steel candles—you could still feel the planet’s curve pushing you further from the center of everything. Here stubborn souls clung to hockey and gas rigs while the rest of the world spun without us, powered by our gas. Taché, Manitoba may be the longitudinal belly button of the country, but the three prairie provinces each hold their own sense of exile and remoteness. Little more than a century ago, this was edge-of-the-map blank space, drawn in there-be-dragons ink and if you squinted hard enough in January, it still looked that way. The coastlines had been drawn but the interior map was largely unknown, perhaps even more unknown to European eyes than the heart of Africa.
In countries like France, Spain or the U.K, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who has never made the pilgrimage to their respective capitals. But poll your average Albertan or Saskatchewanian about Toronto, or heaven forbid Ottawa, and they’ll shrug, but mention Disneyworld, Las Vegas or Cancun and suddenly you’re speaking their mother tongue. The cultural capitals of our country are strangers, but Mickey and Donald (both the duck and the felon) and Jesus and Tim Hortons—those, we’re on a first name basis with.
It’s a physical and cultural isolation that has created an almost instinctual need for self-reliance and forged the independent character of the settlers of these lands that in recent memory had been stewarded by others. English, Irish, German, French, Scandinavian, Polish and Ukrainian immigrants each brought their own cultural backgrounds with them as they settled. They dragged their grudges with them, sure, but the climate didn’t care. Winter burned the pettiness out of them. You could hate your neighbor’s accent in July, but by January you’d be chopping firewood together just to keep the wolves out. It was out of self-preservation that the cultural tapestry that blankets at least the southern portions of these country-sized masses of land was fashioned. They stitched a quilt out of desperation and frostbite, and we’re still wrapped in it—itchy, patched, half fraying at the edges, but ours.
In that hat I saw the whole goddamned prairie psyche—distance, frostbite, paranoia, and the gnawing belief that someone, somewhere, is laughing at you. There on his cranium he was advocating the Republic of Western Canada. And the real kicker, the crowning madness, was that the symbol of this supposed prairie independence wasn’t a buffalo or an oil rig or even a flaming pickup truck, but the goddamn Union Jack. Flying the flag of the very empire we’d once been desperate to crawl out from under.
It’s a communal madness that makes the harikari of the Brexit debacle look like amateur night at the school play, complete with paper swords and cardboard crowns. A pantomime of sovereignty wrapped in a suicidal fever dream. It was a nihilistic death wish to turn the prairies into a landlocked petro-state, a kind of South Sudan in cowboy boots with a Nickelback national anthem, stripped naked before the very oil companies that had already been writing the script and selling the tickets for decades.
That hat wasn’t just polyester—it was prophecy. A stitched-up fantasy of independence that reeked of colonial Stockholm syndrome, petro-dollar fervor, and the gnawing paranoia of a people duped into thinking that the universe itself is conspiring to keep them waiting in line.
That polyester sermon dredged up a playground joke from my youth, one I didn’t even understand at the time but that carried the same paranoid DNA:
“What does Petro-Canada stand for?”
“Pierre Elliott Trudeau Rips Off Canada.”
That playground backronym joke carried the same obsessive conspiratorial thinking that still powers the polyester gospel: Ottawa as thief, the homesteading West as victim. The myth never dies, it just finds new hosts. But in recent years it’s soured and been made crude. It’s self-consciously regional and now seems to naturally gravitate toward American populism and its cowboy-republican imbecilic swagger. Because Alberta is a place drunk on its own self-deceit, forever telling itself it’s oppressed even as it gorges on federal subsidies.
Given the chance, I could see the old man’s anti-immigrant rant sliding seamlessly into a screed about Ottawa strangling Alberta as he moaned about what he paid for at the pumps. But here’s the cosmic joke, like all gospel, it was based on myth and like most prairie scripture, it was printed on the thinnest pulp. The truth, if you can call it that, is a hallucination in reverse: Ottawa hasn’t been the oil patch’s hangman, it’s been the midwife. From the seventies on, the feds haven’t been standing on Alberta’s oxygen tube, they have been the ones pumping air into Syncrude’s failing lungs, buying in when no one else would.
The great irony, of course, is that the very policies our polyester prophet would have sworn were proof of Ottawa’s eternal treachery, in fact, tell a different story. Even the National Energy Program, that prairie barroom dartboard bogeyman, was less Judas than sugar daddy—kneecapping conventional drillers, yes, but at the same time showering the tar sands with price guarantees and tax breaks fat enough to double their profits. What he remembers as a noose was in fact a golden IV drip.
Then came Chrétien and Martin in the nineties, swinging the gates wide open with more concessions and more subsidies, until the tar boom roared back to life like Frankenstein under a Tesla coil. And through it all, the supposed “caps” on emissions were padded enough to barely sting, a mere 20-cent hiccup on every barrel, the price of a Timbit in exchange for absolution.
But myth is stronger than memory. In the prairie psyche, Ottawa is forever the great oppressor, the absentee landlord, the vampire on our jugular. Never mind that the vampire has been feeding us blood transfusions since day one. Never mind that the cap still allows production to rise. The polyester crew’s narrative is cleaner, angrier, easier to howl: We are denied, we are punished, we are exiled. And so the hat-men mutter, Ken-Kevin-Kyle-Chad incarnate, cursing the very hand that kept their industry’s head above the quicksand. That’s the cosmic joke stitched into their caps: grievance as religion, myth as mother tongue, exile as brand identity.
But the real con isn’t Ottawa. For half a century, the oil patch has sold men like this polyester prophet the idea that any limit, any royalty hike, any cap would kill the golden goose, that the only choice was pump now, spend now, or watch it all vanish into the ether. And Albertans believed it. They still do. They mutter it into their double doubles while the oil itself sits calmly underground, patient as a glacier, waiting for extraction whether it’s this decade or the next. The oil was never going anywhere, but the money did. It went sideways, into backhanders, into boardrooms, into shareholder pockets, into the hands of the same corporate ventriloquists who convinced the province that saving for tomorrow was an act of treason.
That’s the brutal irony: the polyester sermon he wears on his skull is not a prophecy of oppression but a cover-up for a crime. And the cruelest part is he doesn’t even see the robbery. He champions it, with spit on his lips, convinced the thieves are his saviors.
While Norway salted away a trillion-dollar sovereign fund derived from their oil to bankroll its future, Alberta’s Heritage Fund limps along at a fraction of what Norway’s sovereign wealth fund earns in interest in a single year, pocket change scattered on the floor of the legislative ground’s casino, chips long since pocketed by those that run the house. It’s a generational robbery that began in the 70s and will continue to lift from our progeny’s pockets for generations to come.
How was this allowed to happen? How do you turn one of the richest resource provinces on earth into a beggar at the blackjack table? You don’t need bad luck or bad rocks. The difference isn’t geology; it isn’t even geography. It isn’t luck. It isn’t even stupidity. It’s narrative, you just need a story. And the oil patch has always been the best funded storyteller in the room.
Control the narrative and you control how people read, think, act and most importantly, vote. But what started as a cover-up for the largest heist in Canadian history has corrupted into something worse: a weaponized paranoia, an industry-scripted faith that has crept into the day to day lives of a once pragmatic people and turned whole provinces into apostles of their own exploitation.
And the heist was never just about money — it is about obedience.
The oil patch learned long ago that to keep the marks docile, you don’t just rig the royalties, you rig the culture. Enter the greasy handshake: the patch and the pew, the drill rig and the pulpit. Together they crank the organ and pass the plate, telling citizens that to doubt the industry is to doubt God, and to doubt God is to put your kids in danger.
Like an invasive species, no-think conservatism and anti-science revivalism have sunk their roots into the prairies, choking out whatever autochthonous prairie pragmatism that once existed. Creepy pro-life billboards that used to be the roadside wallpaper of America’s Deep South now sprout along Alberta’s Highway 2, their fetus-porn graphics becoming as common as pumpjacks. What was once a culture of survival and grit and community has soured into a brittle fundamentalism, almost Calvinist in its creed: suffering is righteous, doubt is sin, and questioning the oil patch is heresy punishable by exile.
That’s why the same forces that shriek about carbon caps while cashing subsidy cheques are now rallying against vaccines, against sex ed, against books in school libraries. They wrap themselves in the language of “protecting children,” but what they really mean is protecting the narrative. Protecting it from witches, drag queens, climate scientists, Indigenous voices, and anyone who dares point out that the emperor’s pipelines are naked.
The instinct to control the narrative doesn’t stop at economics; it must also sanitize the past and police the imagination. Not so many years ago it would have been unthinkable to read headlines about banning books from Canadian schools. We told ourselves that was the territory of the Taliban, of Bible Belt witch-hunters in the Deep South, of regimes so insecure they feared women and the alphabet itself. Canadians smirked, secure in our myth of pluralism, congratulating ourselves on knowing better, on being better than them, dismissing book bans as the backwards practices of Afghanistan or Alabama. Now Alberta joins the A-list of the atavistic, shelving books with the same proud barbarism once mocked as foreign.
Essential reading — Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, Huxley’s Brave New World, Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Walker’s The Color Purple, our own Nobel laureate Alice Munro’s Friend of My Youth, Judy Blume’s Forever — even Orwell’s 1984, the goddamn instruction manual for this kind of authoritarian cosplay — all of a suddenly treated like samizdat, contraband slipped under the desk in whispers. Under the watchful eye of Alberta’s Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides and Premier Danielle Smith, literature itself becomes pornography, ideas become narcotics, and the school library is transformed into an opium den raid. These self-styled prairie ayatollahs slap fatwas on fiction, mistaking novels for bombs and metaphors for Molotovs, as if a copy of Blume could detonate on contact and Munro’s quiet stories might foment insurrection in the hockey rink parking lot.
But this isn’t protection. It’s prophylaxis of the mind. It’s making sure kids never stumble across the questions that lead to solutions, never learn the histories that expose the theft, never understand that their friends and neighbors—brown, queer, immigrant, Indigenous—are human beings and not the villains of some polyester gospel. This isn’t happening in order to protect children from danger, but to shield the industry and the pulpit from questions—questions about climate, about identity, about power, questions that might one day burn the polyester gospel to ash.
The patch knows that the only thing more dangerous than a royalty review is a generation that can see through the lie. So the hat-men rant about immigrants, the preachers howl about books, and together they keep the spotlight off the pipelines, off the subsidies, off the trillion-dollar wealth fund we never built. It’s a symbiosis of paranoia: oil feeds the coffers, the culture warriors feed the fury, and both gorge themselves on a public too dazed to notice the robbery happening in real time. The house lights are on, the chips are gone, and still the crowd cheers for the thieves.
But the cheering doesn’t echo on its own. It’s piped in, like a laugh track on a dead sitcom. A handful of conglomerates own nearly every newspaper, radio mic, and flickering screen on the prairies, and the oil patch keeps their lights on. Why bother burning books when you can buy the publisher? Why bother silencing dissent when you can flood the room with the same hymn sheet until people forget there were ever other songs?
Our poet-priestess warned us. Atwood’s now-banned Talewas meant as a parable for America, a dystopia with a U.S. zip code. But the borders are porous, and the contagion has seeped north. Alberta drifts closer to Gilead than Ottawa, its prairie theocracy stitched together from pulpits, pipelines, and Postmedia op-eds.
And if we are not careful, the polyester gospel muttered over coffee and Timbits will harden into law. Not tomorrow, not in some imagined future, but in the next election cycle, the next school board meeting, the next book pulled from a library shelf. What was satire yesterday will be statute tomorrow. What was prophecy will be policy.
That is the real warning: dystopia doesn’t arrive with jackboots and sirens — it sidles in with billboards and bylines, with pulpits and press releases, until one morning you wake up and it’s as real as mercury in your drinking water, as priests in your bedroom, as security guards standing watch over the empty shelves where the books used to be. And when the bookshelves are bare, the laughter canned, and the headlines stamped from the same mold, you’ll still hear the crowd cheering for the thieves.
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