Alberta Strong and Forever Exploited

The Miller family lived on a gravel patch at the edge of a neglected trailer park outside of Red Deer, their lives deeply rooted in the cramped, wood-paneled confines of a rusted-out mobile home that smelled permanently of cheap tobacco and stale engine oil. Norm Miller spent his days tinkering beneath the hoods of two decaying, mismatched pickup trucks that sat up on concrete blocks in the weeds, vehicles with rotted floorboards and faded paint jobs that had not seen a paved highway in nearly a decade. To the Millers, these decaying relics of consumerism were symbols of a rugged, blue-collar independence that the distant elites in Ottawa allegedly stole from them. Linda, her hands calloused from years of low-wage retail work, decorated the cracked laminate walls of the trailer not with family photographs or local art, but with a sprawling, sun-bleached collection of imported political memorabilia. The teenage boys, raised on a steady diet of algorithmic grievance and late-night internet forums, wore stained camouflage caps and spoke in an affected, performative Southern drawl that they copied from online videos.

​Central to the entire existence of the household was an intense, pseudo-religious devotion to the great god Donald Trump, whose gilded image served as the ultimate spiritual anchor for their profound resentment. A massive, weathered flag bearing the leader's name flew proudly from a makeshift flagpole strapped to the bumper of the rustiest truck, flapping aggressively against the gray Alberta sky. Every family meal became an act of political worship, with Norm preaching about the golden towers of New York and the promised land of Florida while the family nodded in feral agreement. For Norm, achieving this American paradise required a calculated, two-step betrayal of his own country, starting with the immediate realization of Alberta separatism. Cutting ties with Canada was never about true independence, but rather a necessary first step to clear away the federal laws blocking their ultimate goal.

​Once the shackles of Ottawa were broken, the grand design called for a gradual, systematic adoption of the province into the United States, pushing through the political channels until Alberta was officially crowned as the fifty-first state. They genuinely believed that by loudly mimicking the aesthetics of American poverty, adopting the grievances of a foreign electorate, and offering up the provincial oil patch on a silver platter, they could somehow catch the eye of their golden idol and be welcomed as equals. The absolute tragedy of their existence lay in the total blindness to reality, as they threw their meager, desperate loyalty toward a billionaire class that would never look at a rusty Alberta trailer park with anything other than absolute disgust. When the border finally shifted, the Millers discovered that the empire they worshiped viewed them not as proud, liberated patriots, but as second-class territorial outsiders to be ignored and economically exploited.