posted November 17, 2004 12:57
Rhinoceros Party of Canada
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.The Rhinoceros Party of Canada, also known as the Rhinos, was a registered political party in Canada from the 1960s to the 1990s. Operating within the Canadian tradition of political satire, the Rhinoceros Party's basic credo was to "promise nothing", although in fact they often promised outlandishly impossible schemes designed to amuse and entertain the voting public.
The Rhinos were started in 1963 by Doctor Jacques Ferron, "Éminence de la Grande Corne du parti Rhinoceros", a famous separatist writer. In the 1970s, a group of artists joined the party and created a comedic political platform to contest the federal election. Ferron (1979), poet Gaston Miron (1972) and singer Michel Rivard (1980) ran against Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in his Montreal seat.
The party, which claimed to be the spiritual descendants of a Brazilian rhinoceros who had once been elected mayor of São Paulo, listed Cornelius the First, a rhinoceros from the Granby zoo east of Montreal, as its leader. The party claimed that the rhinoceros was an appropriate symbol for a political party since politicians, by nature, are "thick-skinned, slow-moving, dim-witted, and have large, hairy horns growing out of the middle of their faces".
Platform promises released by the Rhinoceros Party included:
repealing the law of gravity,
paving the province of Manitoba to create the world's largest parking lot,
instituting illiteracy as Canada's third official language,
tearing down the Rocky Mountains so that Albertans could see the Pacific sunset,
building sloping bicycle paths across the country so that Canadians could "coast from coast to coast",
annexing the United States, which would take its place as the third territory (after the Yukon and North-West Territories) in Canada's backyard, in order to raise the average national temperature,
replacing the Canadian Armed Forces with clones of Vladislav Tretiak,
making bubble gum the national currency, so that it could be inflated or deflated at will,
breeding a mosquito that would only hatch in January so that "the little buggers will freeze to death",
turning Montreal's rue Ste-Catherine into the world's longest bowling alley,
selling the Canadian Senate at an antique auction in California,
painting Canada's coastal sea limits so that Canadian fish would know where they were at all times,
counting the Thousand Islands to make sure none were missing,
banning lousy Canadian winters.
Despite the obvious appeal of banning winter, the Rhinoceros Party never succeeded in electing Members of Parliament, but in 1984, the party was Canada's fourth-largest political party in number of total votes received. They would sometimes come in second place in certain ridings, humiliating traditional Canadian parties in the process. In one election, for instance, the Rhinoceros party candidate, a professional lady clown called Chatouille (which means tickle, in French), got more votes than André Payette, a popular broadcaster who was then running for the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.
The party disbanded in 1993, when it chose to boycott that year's election due to new rules that deregistered any political party that did not run candidates in at least 50 ridings.
François Gourd, a prominent Rhino, later started another political movement, the entartistes. The entartistes attracted attention in the 1990s by planting cream pies in the faces of various Canadian politicians.
Other Rhinoceros Party members founded the Parti citron (Lemon Party), which attempted to bring a similar perspective to provincial politics in Quebec, with much less success. Recently however, the Parti Citron became a federal party, and has enjoyed widespread support from silly people nationwide.
In 2001, veteran Rhinoceros Party organizer Brian "Godzilla" Salmi, who received his nickname because of the Godzilla suit he wore while campaigning, revived the Rhinoceros Party to contest the British Columbia provincial election. While they pulled some pranks that earned some media coverage, none of their prospective candidates appeared on the ballots, as the party claimed the $100 candidate registration fee was a financial hardship. The party disbanded shortly thereafter.
More recently, the Absolutely Absurd Party has attempted to revive the traditions of political satire that the Rhinoceros Party originated. This new group, however, is related to the Rhinos only in spirit.
The Rhino Party received some posthumous media attention during the 2004 federal election campaign when Ben Mahoney attempted to run under the party's banner in the Yukon. When election officials denied Mahoney a place on the ballot due to his inability to provide an accountant willing to certify his election expense account, Mahoney vowed to go before the Yukon Supreme Court to either be put on the ballot or stop the June 28, 2004 election. He was unsuccessful on both counts.
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Electoral results
Election # of candidates nominated # of seats won # of total votes % of popular vote
1965 1 0 321 0.00%
1968 2 0 5,802 0.07%
1972 1 0 1,565 0.02%
1979 63 0 62,601 0.55%
1980 121 0 110,286 1.01%
1984 88 0 98,171 0.78%
1988 74 0 52,173 0.40%
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posted November 17, 2004 12:57
