Too bad the Rhinoceros Party still isn't a political party.
[quote:6eeb6]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 been elected member of São Paulo's city council in the 1950s, 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, can move fast as hell when in danger, and have large, hairy horns growing out of the middle of their faces."[/quote:6eeb6]
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,
* 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",
* 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 North-West Territories) 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,
* 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 Sainte-Catherine 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 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 a Penny Hoar (
http://www.walnet.org/csis/news/toronto ... -9408.html) in Toronto on a safe sex platform,
* 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.
04-25-2005, 04:56 AM
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