I didn't like the Google Calendar app, and I decided to find a different calendar app that had the bells and whistles I liked. When I found one that I felt was okay (SolCalendar), I backed up the GCal app's apk, then uninstalled it. After that, even if the SolCal app was synced to my gmail account where my calendar is linked to, my events wouldn't populate. It also happened with another calendar app which I tried just to prove my theory. It turns out, if you don't have the GCal app installed, your Google calendar events will not show up on whatever calendar app you use. In the end, I uninstalled the other calendar apps and stuck with GCal instead because I didn't want to use up my phone's storage space for multiple apps that did the same thing. Of course I could choose to shun Google calendar completely and just use the local calendar (phone's calendar) so I could use my own calendar choice, but that means there would be no syncing. And if I had to move to a different phone, I'm back to square one.
Ah well.