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Jason Kenney and Tyler Shandro Eating Orange Slices While the Grown Ups Talk

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This is a painting of Jason Kenney and Tyler Shandro enjoying a snack while the grown ups talk. The boys sure are tuckered out. And who can blame them? They’ve had a tough week, and the leather faced oil baron tracksuit daddies clutching clipboards that have been hollering instructions at them from the sidelines have awarded them with a mid-size Tupperware of orange slices.

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Jason is brooding from a press conference on Friday when a reporter had the audacity to ask about a transition from the province’s oil dependency. Steam visibly pouring from his ears, Kenney said through clenched jaw “that kind of question, in the middle of an economic crisis, from a Calgary-based media outlet — really frankly throws me for a loop”. Then he mumbled through the tired script about oil and gas known to all Albertans, provided to him by the aforementioned tracksuit daddies. After all, we had to get it tattooed to our lower backs as stipulation for receiving our 400 Ralph Bucks fifteen years ago. Kenney left before the inevitable follow up question “it seems like an economic crisis is exactly the time to be asking this question you fucking moron…(?)”

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It’s an unfair situation for Jason. The only reason he left his plum gig out east to begin with was for the opportunity to hold us by our ankles and shake the pennies from our pants for four years. After that he was destined to lead the pasty cavalcade of irrelevance that is the federal conservative party. I mean, just a few months ago, all you had to was swagger up to a microphone and say “oil oil oil oil” and the whole of Alberta would be whipped into a cummy frenzy of delusional grandeur. And now suddenly, people expect governance? Leadership? Decision making? Such lofty expectations have never been imposed upon Albertan politicians. Anyhow, Kenney’s cooling his jets with his buddy Tyler and a tasty snack. But he’ll be back with all manner of impassioned elegies as his beloved industry rages against the dying of the light in no time.

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Meanwhile, Shandro’s been on the orange slice diet ever since he personally confronted a doctor in a crimson faced tizzy about a meme he’d found on the internet. While the vitamin C heavy orange slices have done nothing to curb his petulance, he’s been making major gains in the pulpy diarrhea department. It would be prudent to recommend a more diverse diet to shore up the fecal hemorrhaging, but asking such questions in the midst of bum crisis might really throw him for a loop, or get his goat, or whatever.

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Shandro is in a state of constant, incompetent desperation because Covid-19 proved that a global dystopia can come earlier than the 10 years allowed by runaway climate change, and he has to rush his attempts to kneecap public healthcare for personal profit. Otherwise he would have more time to string together a better justification for his heinous cuts than “Whoopsie doodle!”

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This is not to demonize the gingery real boy. In these unprecedented times empathy must be our fuel, drawn from the silty sands of understanding, transported through the pan-national pipeline of graciousness to tankers of kindness, and ultimately the highly profitable international markets of compassion. This is all to say Tyler Shandro clearly hates doctors, nurses, support workers, and probably veterinarians. Suddenly he’s the Minister of Health? How does that make any sense? What a cruel hand to be dealt. The same goes for Kenney, stuck leading Alberta when he would love nothing more to slouch back to Ottawa where he could defraud Canadian taxpayers unscrutinized. Now it looks like we’re stuck with each other, haha!

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Not to mix sports metaphors here, but it feels like 1992 hit film The Mighty Ducks except it doesn’t progress past the first act. Coach Bombay never realizes he’s a washed up piece of sh*t and he blames the players for all his failures. Then kills them and harvests their world class internal organs which turn out to be literally worthless. It’s a sad and disgusting movie.

But excuse me. What about the painting? It’s 2.5 ft x 2.5ft in a nice ass frame, acrylic and oil pastel on paper. This ensures that whenever you mention Alberta’s theoretical capacity to produce wealth outside the oil and gas industry, a middle aged man will scream “but your painting is made with oil! Aha! Gotcha!”, then they will smirk with such smugness their face implodes. The shards along the upper left and right edges of the are representative of the fact that this actually used to be a nice glass framed print that I smashed with a hammer in a dumpster to access the sweet sweet paper beneath.

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Legend has it that if you hang this in your house a Shandro will crawl out of an oil stain on your driveway and holler at your teenage’d children. $1.7 billion dollars OBO for the original, prints available.