EDMONTON – Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has released a scathing response to this year’s throne speech in which he excoriated the federal government for not presenting a single sonnet, ode or even haiku in praise of the fossil fuel industry.
“Do you know how many words rhyme with ‘oil?’” a fuming Kenney asked. “Toil. Coil. Foil. Loyal. This preposterous exclusion really makes my blood boil. Boil! There’s another one!”
Kenney, who refuses to make any public statement without including at least a rhyming couplet dedicated to ‘his liquid beloved and her brave knights of extraction,’ believes that the several mentions in the speech of the Liberal government’s ongoing support for the energy industry don’t go nearly far enough and that at this point only an epic ballad to hydrocarbons read live from memory by Trudeau will be enough to put this matter to rest.
“The Trudeau government has proven time and again that while they like the oil industry and are willing to spend billions propping up the oil industry, they are not passionately in love with the oil industry, and that’s simply not good enough. Alberta deserves not just a provincial government that spends every waking moment doting on this treasure, this jewel, this gem of an industry, but a federal one as well,” Kenney maintained.
“Forget not the dark mistress of energy, that which all us ken,
But give eternal thanks to the stored power of our one and only, our bitumen,” Kenney said, wiping a single tear from his eye.
When he’d collected himself, Kenney also took umbrage with the use of the term ‘intersectionality’ in the throne speech, calling the widely accepted idea that race, gender, class and other identities overlap to create different experiences of discrimination “a kooky academic theory, like evolution, or gravity.”
