Darren, 45.

5:10 a.m. Darren's alarm. Black coffee, two eggs, the truck warming in the dark. He pulls out of his driveway in Timberlea and the radio is talking about Alberta like it's a country, which, technically, as of yesterday, it is.

At the yard, his foreman Big Mike is on the phone, animated, almost grinning. The royalty regime is theirs now. One hundred cents of every dollar. The company has been told to expect a contract bump within the quarter.

Two of his crew didn't show. Curtis from Stephenville and Trevor from Glace Bay. They flew east on Sunday. Their work permits are now a question and neither of them wanted to wait around to find out the answer.

His wife Karen teaches grade four in Anzac. Last night she sat at the kitchen table for an hour with a printout of her federal student loan terms and a pencil. She still has nineteen thousand left on it. The loan is held by the National Student Loans Service Centre. Nobody in Ottawa is answering the phone today.

By eight he's on the rig, hood down, the hot blue arc of the stick narrowing the world to six inches of weld. He doesn't think about any of it for the next four hours. This is the part of the day that hasn't changed.

Lunch, sitting on a diesel drum. He does the rough math on a napkin. If the company pays out a ten-percent bonus and the Canadian dollar slides another nickel, he's actually ahead this year. His mortgage is in Canadian dollars to a bank that is now, suddenly, a foreign bank. He's not sure what that means yet.

After shift, the bar. The mood is genuinely good. Somebody buys a round. Somebody else asks, quietly, who's going to do the welding inspection certifications now, because that was a federal body. Nobody knows. Somebody changes the subject.

He drives home along Highway 63 in the dark. Karen has left the porch light on. He sits in the truck for a minute before going in, listening to the engine tick. He got what he voted for. He's still figuring out what that means.