OTTAWA, ON ― Suddenly dropping his calm, boring, bankerish public façade, Prime Minister Mark Carney responded to a simple inquiry as to how his haircut was looking so far with a screaming, red-faced demand to “cut until there’s nothing left to cut,” prompting the unfortunate barber in question, Tyler English, to cower behind the check-in counter.
“Why are you stopping? Why aren’t you cutting? Don’t you see all this excess and fluff?” Carney bawled. “I told you I wanted you to get rid of everything that doesn’t need to be there! Everything! Do you think I need hair? No! It’s a waste of shampoo and second shampoo and conditioner, and I’m paying you a lump sum now to eliminate those ongoing costs!”
“It was surreal. I was super nervous to start, my first time cutting the hair of the literal PM after his old guy retired. I expected to possibly get in trouble for cutting too much, but now I’ve got him yelling at me for not getting rid of it all?” recalled the shaken barber afterwards.
Carney was thoroughly unmollified by English’s pleas to stop treating him like an unruly MP. “With all due respect, Mr. Prime Minister, slow down and give things some more thought. I can’t cut much more without taking a significant amount of flesh with it, which would have long-term ramifications and be hard to put back in place once gone. Plus, there are non-monetary benefits to hair, like preventing sunburn and―”
At this point, Carney interrupted to decry non-monetary benefits as “witchcraft,” “a witch hunt against sovereign developers,” “anti-Canadian Luddite red-tape created by tree-hugging hippies who hate solutions,” and “conceptually confusing.”
“I was pretty impressed that he managed all those insults in one breath,” English admitted.
Onlookers report that English courageously made one last attempt to convince the PM to reconsider, appealing to his years of haircut expertise, Carney’s face shape, and the fact that, like it or not, appearances matter in politics, and Canadians would likely look more favourably upon a skull which was not covered in nicks and even outright gouges as would surely be the result of the PM’s injunction to “slash it all!”
To this, the PM responded that even if he cared what Canadians thought, “which, and I thought I’d already made this very clear, I don’t,” he could always just create photos of himself with more hair using AI.
“I have a majority,” observed Carney when asked for comment on his outburst.
However, English was richly rewarded for his barber/butcher services. “He cut my property taxes ― just mine, specifically, I don’t know how he can do that ― and also all the health and safety regulations on my shop. And he left a seven-figure tip, after ensuring that there were journalists watching. When I asked where all that money came from, he just mumbled something about frivolous pharmacare and left.”
