Rhinoceros Party of Canada: Why Canada used to own politics

The Rhinoceros Party of Canada was a satirical federal political party in Canada from the 60s until the early 90s. They were much of an entertainment source and a kind of protestation party for voters. 

The party claimed to be the spiritual descendants of Cacareco, a Brazilian rhinoceros who was elected member of São Paulo's city council in 1958, and listed Cornelius the First, a rhinoceros from the Granby Zoo, east of Montreal, as its leader.

It declared that the rhinoceros was an appropriate symbol for a political party since politicians, by nature, are: "thick-skinned, slow-moving, dim-witted, can move fast as hell when in danger, and have large, hairy horns growing out of the middle of their faces.

As seen at right, the party used as its logo a woodcut of a rhinoceros by Albrecht Dürer, with the words D'une mare à l'autre (a French translation of Canada's Latin motto a mari usque ad mare, playing on the word mare, which means pond in French) at the top.

I won’t describe them much, as the most interesting thing they had were their programme:

• repealing the law of gravity,
• reducing the speed of light because it’s much too fast,
• paving Manitoba to create the world’s largest parking lot,
• providing higher education by building taller schools,
• instituting English, French and illiteracy as Canada’s three official languages,
• offering to retrain those constituents who want to become illiterate by enrolling them in a state educational institution,
• tearing down the Rocky Mountains so that Albertans could see the Pacific sunset, or moving them one metre west as a make-work project,
• legalising pot. And pans. And spatulas. And other kitchen utensils,
• building sloping roads and bicycle paths across the country so that Canadians could “coast from coast to coast”,
• making all sidewalks out of rubber to prevent inebriated people from hurting themselves when they fall down
• responding to the energy crisis, reducing energy costs for transportation by moving the cities of Montréal 50km west and Toronto 50km east,
• abolishing pumping oil out of the ground as that oil is there to keep the earth moving smoothly on its axis and if you withdraw the oil, the whole thing will grind to a halt,
• abolishing the environment because it’s too hard to keep clean and it takes up so much space,
• annexing the United States, which would take its place as the third territory, after the Yukon and the Northwest Territories (Nunavut did not yet exist) in Canada’s backyard, in order to raise the mean temperature of Canada by one degree Celsius,
• replacing the Canadian Armed Forces with clones of Vladislav Tretiak,
• end crime by abolishing all laws
• making bubble gum the national currency, so that it could be inflated or deflated at will,
• Making the pop bottle the official currency of Canada as the value went up, not down
• Paving the Bay of Fundy to create more parking in the Maritimes
• Demolishing the Rockies and using the resulting gravel to make a national nature trail
• breeding a mosquito that would only hatch in January so that “the little buggers will freeze to death”,
• turning Montreal’s Saint Catherine Street into the world’s longest bowling alley,
• adopting the British system of driving on the left; this was to be gradually phased in over five years with large trucks and tractors first, then buses, eventually including small cars and bicycles last,
• as an energy-saving idea, putting larger wheels on the back of all cars so that they will always be going downhill,
• selling the Canadian Senate at an antique auction in California,
• putting the national debt on Visa,
• declaring war on Belgium because a Belgian cartoon character, Tintin, killed a rhinoceros in one of the cartoons,
• offering to call off the proposed Belgium-Canada war if Belgium delivered a case of mussels and a case of Belgian beer to Rhinoceros “Hindquarters” in Montréal (the Belgian Embassy in Ottawa did, in fact, do this),
• 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,
• running Penny Hoar on a safe sex platform in Toronto,
• running more than one candidate per riding as an MP’s salary is certainly enough to support more than one person,
• exploiting acid rain as an electrical energy source by placing dissimilar-metal electrodes in Canadian swimming pools in order to use them as batteries,
• making Canadians stronger by putting steroids in the water,
• banning lousy Canadian winters,
• moving the Vatican to Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville, Quebec to promote tourism,
• putting the West Edmonton Mall on wheels and rolling it to areas of the country suffering from economic depression,
• turning the Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine tunnel in Montreal into a free carwash by poking holes in the ceiling,
• transforming the Montreal Olympic Stadium into a gigantic beluga aquarium,
• drafting the Queen mother to sew up the hole in the ozone layer
• building giant domes over several conservative neighbourhoods to keep the dinosaurs, both real and political, in.
• annexing Greenland and creating a cartel with other northern nations in order to sell icebergs to the Saudis; the cartel would be called “Snopec”,
• digging a canal from coast to coast, by hand, to reduce unemployment; and then, leveling the Rocky Mountains and using the canal to transport the material east to fill in the Great Lakes, in order to expand Canada’s landmass.
• impose an “import quota on lousy winters — Canadians are sick of being God’s frozen people. It’s time to get back to the four basic seasons: salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar.”
• include the word “fun” in Acts of Parliament, Acts of provincial legislatures, and Bylaws of municipalities, from which it was apparently conspicuously absent.

Other interesting promises from the party:

• The Rhino Party also declared that, should they somehow actually win an election, they would immediately dissolve and force a second election.
• A British Columbia splinter group proposed running a professional dominatrix for the position of party whip, renaming “British Columbia” to “La La Land”, moving the provincial capital, and merging with the Progressive Conservative Party so as “not to split the silly vote.”
• Bryan Gold of the Rhinoceros Party described the party platform as two feet high and made of wood. “My platform is the one I’m standing on.” A candidate named Ted “not so” Sharp ran in Flora MacDonald’s Ontario riding with the campaign slogan “Fauna, not flora”, promising to give fauna equal representation. He also took a stand on capital punishment: “If it was good enough for my grandfather, then it’s good enough for me.”

I hope they’re coming back for the next elections!

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Edit: Post has been written by using this Sources: Wikipedia, Quora, Huffington Post