Alberta Liberal Leader Wants You To Know He’s Good At Layin’ Pipe

With the Albertan election less than two weeks away, David Khan, the leader of the little thought-of Alberta Liberal Party and the province’s first LGBTQ leader, decided to loudly and proudly announce to the world how proficient he is at “laying pipe.”

This weekend, Khan and his social media team, leaned into the joke after he memorably dropped it at the Alberta leadership debate last week—making hats and other merch. The red hat, indicative of Trump’s now ubiquitous MAGA hat, states in bright yellow letters, #LayingPipe.

It’s an interesting strategy to say the least—especially now that we know that Khan was, at first, ignorant on the term’s, uh, other meaning. Laying pipe, for those of you in the dark, while yes does refer to actually act of laying pipe into the ground is far more well known as a term for having very good sexual relations with a person of your choosing. The “pipe”, you see, refers to a penis, and the “laying” is referencing the fact that during sexual intercourse a penis will typically enter an orifice of some sort. Now when you combine these two terms—the penis (the pipe) and the entering of the orifice (the laying)—you get “laying pipe.” In fact, one of Canada’s most beloved philosophers, David Wilcox, wrote extensively on this phenomena.

“I'm layin' pipe all night long. Layin' pipe. I'm workin' so hard. I'm layin' pipe. All night long. Layin' pipe,” reads Wilcox’s thesis on the term. “To satisfy that woman.”

“I put the pipe in. I pull it out again,” he adds. “My back is so sore. I can't work much more. I can't get my traction. The ground's too wet.”

Thanks for that, Dave.

Wilcox published his seminal work on layin’ pipe way back in 1987, but it seems Khan is not as well read in the works of the Bearcat as most of us and didn’t know why the term was popular. This weekend, after some people made fun of him for the hat, Khan told HuffPost that he thinks "people know that I didn't know what it meant.”

"What I do mean about it is that we've got to get pipelines constructed in Alberta and get people back to work,” he said.

As mentioned above the whole shabang started when Khan, at the leaders debate late last week, started discussing his oilfield credentials and said, "I'm the only leader up here who's actually laid pipe.” First of all, nice, second of all, it didn’t take this term very long to pop off online and his staff to start earnestly making swag around the one line. This pipe layin’ ain’t cheap either, as the t-shirt and hat combo of the term is running for $99 on the Liberal website.

Now, Khan did eventually realize his flub but by then layin’ pipe mania had swept Alberta—this becomes especially impressive when you realize that Alberta typically sits at an eight out of ten for layin’ pipe mania on a typical day. The leader seemingly is embracing his newfound rep with good nature, telling HuffPost, “I really don't mean it that way, but if it means that people are reacting positively… then I think it's a good thing.”

There were many things Khan could have done to save himself this embarrassment, like quickly google the term. The first thing to pop up is Urban Dictionary, which one assumes Khan did not, on this site you will find a variety of (mostly icky) descriptions for “laying pipe.” Even Dictionary.com—which has a surprisingly robust entry on laying pipe—states the term has been around since the 1940s and that the “expression laying pipe is a very visual euphemism for using one's penis to ‘have vigorous sex with’ another.” All of these are things that Khan most likely did not want to reference with his fancy new hat.

While Khan is having his layin’ pipe moment in the sun, he might not be too, too happy come the election on April 16. The party, which for years was Alberta’s official opposition, was crushed in 2015 when they went down to one seat in the house. The party isn’t running a full ticket of candidates and, according to CBC’s poll tracker is only garnering two percent of the vote.

Luckily for him though, there still exists an exit plan for the politician following the election as he can always sail away from his heartache on a “Riverboat Fantasy.”

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