JASON KENNEY GOES EAST AT THE SPEED OF BUSINESS
This is a depiction of Kenney’s departure last week to Ottawa, in the midst of a worsening pandemic to demand $6.5 billion from the federal government. He left in a pugilistic flurry of entitlement and nonsense. Albertans gathered from far and wide to cough and cheer as our nude leader mounted a buffalo reverse cowgirl for the long trek east.
Despite being the only province with no sales tax, one of the lowest corporate tax rates on the continent, and a focus on the fading oil and gas sector so single minded it can only be attributed to a deeply lodged psychosexual fetish, Alberta now has the largest deficit in its history and this is frankly unacceptable to we Albertans, who have grown accustomed to the good life: spending $500 on Jagerbombs every Friday and Saturday at Fuel by Earl’s.
Anyhow, the crowd slowly dispersed while Kenney plodded forth at the speed of business, the sun rising and setting in time lapse while the buffalo rotted away into a mangy skeleton.
The Speed of Business is a term coined by now Minister of Jobs, Economy, and Innovation Doug Schweitzer while talking about the province's tech sector his own government deliberately hobbled during The Before Times. He literally said that. It’s unclear if it’s the result of his speechwriter making a bet on how much ridiculous bullshit he can get his boss to say, or if the term was birthed from the fountainhead of unmolested inspiration in Doug’s beautiful mind. In any case what I can tell you is that the most accurate infographic you can get of the speed of business in Alberta is a rubbery and jaundiced cherub wearing a pristine $700 cowboy hat unmoving atop a rotting buffalo while the slingshotting sun shows the cruel and relentless passage of time.
And what if the impossible happens? What If Kenney’s whining pays off and we get the money? What will it be spent on? Certainly not doctors, teachers, daycare, or people with disabilities, those selfish freeloaders. It won’t go even towards a pipeline, because the feds already bought us one of those and if we tried to do another one ourselves we’d probably just ask Tim Horton’s to build it.
What’s even left in the twisted recesses of the UCP playbook. There are several possibilities, each worse than the last:
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6.5 billion dollar commission to discover which came first, the Vegreville or the Egg
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Get 1000 staffers 1000 typewriters to write for 1000 years to possibly and accidentally maybe, I don’t know, do something that helps anybody that makes less than 600k/year.
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A pair of truck nuts so large they block out the sun, created unprecedented and endless demand in the resource sector. It will also finally allow ancient vampire Steve Allen, head of the million dollar bogus journey into foreign funded smear campaigns against Alberta oil, to leave his castle overlooking Calgary before sundown and get a mango hurricane from the Booster Juice.
Anyhow, own this stirring paean to the slow existential death of Canada’s most hated province. It’s 30’x40’, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, and will look nightmarish wherever you put it.
September 21, 2020