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Jason Kenney's Very Good Day
Jason Kenney pours himself a personably responsible amount of rye and looks out the floor to ceiling window of his suite. Alberta and its capital city is unfurled before him. Dull and pipeline-less. Kenney’s father, just like his son a proud Albertan, always said on a frozen night with a full moon the rocky mountains would cut a barely perceptible silhouette on the western horizon from Edmonton. Tonight was one of those nights.
The rye’s warm hug intermingled with the gloomy resolve in Kenney’s cockles as he sipped from the glass. A soft sigh deposits a puddle of condensation on the window and he carves a lopsided heart around the blurred Legislature. “Oh. Oh, Alberta. If only you knew”
The phone rings.
Kenney sighs another obfuscating cloud onto the windowpane (this one will live and die unembellished by Kenney’s deft finger) and walks to the phone. He sets the glass on an end table and picks up the phone.
“Hello Jason Kenney” The voice is calm, the kind of authoritative cadence that is excavated through decades of experience. It almost sounds as if… no. No it couldn’t be.
“Yes this is Jason. Whom am I speaking to?”
“You, Jason, are speaking to Joe Biden, the President of the United States of America”
Kenney tosses back what’s left of the rye. “Joe Biden. Joe Biden Joe Biden Joe Biden you rat bas-“
“Save me your thrashing, Jason, though god knows I deserve it. I’ve changed my mind”
“Aawweeugh?”
“I saw your appearances on Fox News and MSNBC. I’m calling you firstly to apologize. I am so so sorry for cancelling the Keystone XL Pipeline. The massive job losses? Our reliance on dictator oil? The environmental benefits of moving oil by pipeline rather than rail? I’m ashamed to say we considered none of these of factors. Not when we rejected the pipeline in 2015, and not when we did the very same thing again a week ago. I’ve been an old fool, Jason.”
“Well Joe, sorry stories soothe moods but they sure ain’t move crude.” Jason Kenney adjusts his cowboy hat.
Joe Biden chuckles lightly “I guess I deserve that. If you’ll permit me one more moment of your presence, let me get to the second reason for my call. I will be approving the Keystone XL Pipeline.”
Kenney doesn’t flinch. “Of course you will be, Joe.”
Before Kenney presses the end call button “Oh and Jason?”
“Yes, Joe Biden?”
“To be clear, none of this decision was helped by that drooling waif that is your so-called Prime Minister. What’s his name again? Jervis? Jushua? Jester?”
“Haha, yep, close enough.”
Kenney hangs up the phone and returns to the window. It’s an unexpected victory. Unexpected, that is, to everyone but Jason Kenney. With the trust demonstrated by a $1.5 billion investment in an uncertain pipeline, the dedicated and studious work of the War Room, and Steve Allen’s diligent work to root out foreign funded activists from a base of operations in Palm Springs, the pipeline was a no brainer from the get-go. Obvious choice though it was, still the province has taken on a shimmer, the reverent mountains have crept closer.
Fatigued after a hard day of being the Premier, Kenney turns toward the bedroom, but the phone rings again. Kenney checks his watch. 11:17 PM. He laughs softly. No good deed goes unpunished.
“JASON! JASON KENNEY IT’S ME JUSTIN TRUDEAU. DID YOU HEAR THE NEWS? NO! NO, NO YOU’RE WIPING TOO HARD! STOP IT OW MY BUMMY! SORRY JASON THAT WASN’T FOR YOU ONE OF MY STAFF IS CHANGING MY BIG STUPID DIAPER OUCHIE OUCHIE MY ASS JASON DID YOU HEAR THEY’VE APPROVED KEYSTONE XL AND IT’S ALL THANKS TO YOU UGH GODDAMNIT DON’T EVER LET THE TOP OF YOUR HAND GRAZE THE CHASSIS OF MY WITHERED SCROTUM EVER AGAIN”
“I, uh…”
“NO, NOT YOU JASON. GOD THEIR KNUCKLES FELT LIKE WINE GUMS. I’M TALKING TO YOU ABOUT THE PIPELINE”
“Well Justin, it was the right thing to do. For everybody.”
“I CAN NEVER THANK YOU ENOUGH JASON. ANYTHING YOU NEED IS YOURS.”
“Prime Minister Trudeau, to be frank, Alberta needs a fair deal. We’ve paid more than our fair share, and now we need your help.”
“YES. THAT IS MORE THAN FAIR I WILL SEND YOU A CHEQUE FOR 21 BILLION DOLLARS AND ELIMINATE YOUR DEFICIT. YOU EARNED IT. NO, NO! THE WIPES NEED TO BE FUCKING FIVE PLY OR I WILL LITERALLY JUST POOP MYSELF AS SOON AS YOU PUT ON MY NEW DIAPY K BYEBYE”
Kenney goes straight to bed. He’ll need to get what sleep he can, dawn might come sooner than one would think.
* * *
Jason Kenney wakes up in the morning bathed in golden light, surrounded by the mooning faces of his team.
“Mr. Premier! It’s a miracle! They’ve approved the pipeline!”
Each staffer is holding a different newspaper. The liberal rags so accustomed to clickbait bullying of Canada’s most misunderstood premier are singing a different a tune today.
Jobs Return to Alberta by the Thousands!
Corb Lund and Paul Brandt Debut Chart Topping Single “Thank You Jason Kenney for Saving the Day”
Alberta’s Super Clean Oil Ends the Climate Crisis
Coal Mining in the Rockies Poisons Nobody
Kenney’s Approval Rating Skyrockets, Cuck Prime Minister: “Kenney is the Real Leader”
An old familiar rumble is coming from outside. Anti-maskers? Childless environmentalists with more genders than jobs? Frustrated hockey fans? Maybe one day they were, but no longer.
“Jason! Jason!” the crowd chants.
He steps out to the penthouse veranda of the sky palace and the crowd erupts in rapturous applause. Feet stomp, car horns honk, and truck nuts clack like maracas. The crowd is unabashed in its wide-eyed baby bird adoration.
In neither his first nor last leap of faith, Jason Kenney steps from the ledge. He falls, no, floats, down to the crowd. Landing in open palms like a fleshy trampoline he crowdsurfs along the millions of freshly minted UCP diehards. The mood is almost belligerently joyful in the big beautiful bright sun. Kenney rides the endless crowd to the terminus of the Keystone XL Pipeline and is handed a golden shovel by Rachel Notley. She is wearing a hat of UCP blue. Bluest of the blue.
Here, where Alberta’s millennium of limitless ecstasy begins, the crowd is silent. All eyes are on Jason Kenney, shovel in hand. A tear drops from his cheek and primes the fallow earth with a touch of bittersweet saline. He jams the shovel in the earth and a psychic ripple rips along kilometres of onlookers.
His head stays down, what began with a single tear is now twinned salty rivers from reddened eyes. He looks up, shimmering with pride and sadness.
“I have to go now. My planet needs me.”
In a deafening clatter of bone grinding he bursts into a typhoon of rainbows. Whispers of premiers previous and future layer themselves like four strong winds until a perfectly black bald eagle, many factors too large, bursts from the cocoon of blinding light. Each powerful flap of what-once-was-Kenney’s ascent shakes thimblefuls of oil onto the eyes, chins, and mouths of the agape crowd.
When he is but a dot in the sky, the golden black rain blankets the province like an eager, cleansing downpour after a decade’s drought.
Altogether elsewhere vast herds of reindeer move across miles and miles of golden moss, silently and very fast.
FIN