PARTY NATIONAL COUNCIL
WE CAN SAVE THE RHINO!!!! In Canada today our politicians inspire unintentional humour, and unintentional humour is uninspiring. Whatever happened to the Rhino Party which gave Canadians the chance to flip the bird to the establishment by voting Rhino instead of for the old line parties? The Rhinoceros party could not continue after 1993 due to Elections laws that required a $1000 deposit for each candidate nominated. That stipulation remains but certain other election laws have changed. A party can get federal funds ($1.75 per vote, per year) if it garners more than 2 percent of the vote in a federal election. The Rhino Party would almost certainly get that percentage and more if it ran candidates in every riding. It follows then that if the party were to re-form and raise $308,000 to pay candidates deposits it could continue as long as it got 2 percent of the vote in federal elections. Politics in Canada has had its lighter moments since the demise of the Natural Law party in 1997, most of them provided by the Reform Party and its aliases. Who could forget when they voted to call themselves CCRAP and elected some bible-thumping ninny in a wetsuit? THE CURRENT SCOOP ON ATTEMPTS TO REVIVE THE RHINO PARTY: High-ranking Rhino's Blair Longley (now leading the Marijuana Party) and Charlie McKenzie have refused to co-operate and seem determined that the party remain dead. Charlie McKenzie actually appears to have some legal claim to the Rhino Party name. No matter. This endeavour was intended to be more than just a revival of the Rhinoceros Party. It was meant to a uniting of the fringe into a grand electoral coalition. From this day forth (or until we change our minds) the alternate name of this party is CRAP-Comedian Representative Alliance Party. The Comedian Alliance will continue to build its narrow-based coalition utilizing activists from past great movements such the Rhinos and Natural Law. Charles McKenzie has refused to take part even after being offered the title of Grand Imperial Chimera in recognition of the senior statesman/consiglieri role proposed for him. Thus the position remains vacant. POLICY POINTS: We are going to start off with a few oldies but goodies like turning Stornoway into a bingo paerlor with proceeds going to pay off the national debt and a national flatulation tax. In addition we are proposing further revenue raising intitiatives like selling senate seats on E-bay. We intend, if elected, to trade Celine Dion to the Americans for Christina Aguilera and have the name of Canada legally changed to "Soviet Canuckistan". We demand recognition of the fact that Santa Claus is Canadian and will hold Christmas for ransom to settle trade disputes with foreign trading partners. BIOGRAPHY OF CANADA'S RHINOCEROS PARTY The Rhino Party of Canada, was a registered political party in Canada from the 1963 to 1993. Operating within the Canadian tradition of political satire, the Rhinoceros Party's basic credo was to "promise nothing", although in fact they often promised nutty ideas designed to crack-up voters. The Rhinos were started in 1963 by Docteur Jacques Ferron, "Éminence de la Grande Corne du parti Rhinoceros", a famous writer. In the 1970s, members of the arts community joined the party and created a comedic political platform to contest federal elections. Ferron (1979), poet Gaston Miron (1972) and singer Michel Rivard (1980) ran against Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in his Montreal seat of Mount Royal. The party, which is spiritual descendant 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." Rhinoceros Party platform 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. Sharp's platform on the always controversial abortion issue was a clear "If elected, I promise to never have an abortion." The Rhinos have also promised to break every promise (a platform plank they claim has been copied and put into execution by the mainstream parties) and have promised, if elected, to immediately demand a recount. Other 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_94/to_life-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, Moving the Vatican to Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville, Quebec to promote tourism, Putting West Edmonton Mall on wheels and rolling it to areas of the country suffering from economic depression. A British Columbia splinter group proposed running a professional dominatrix for the position of party whip, breaking with the province's colonial heritage by 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. Despite the obvious appeal of banning winter, the Rhinoceros Party never succeeded in winning a seat in Parliament. In the 1984 federal election, however, the party won the fourth-largest number of votes, after the three main political parties, but ahead of several well-established minor parties. Rhino candidates sometimes came in second in certain ridings, humiliating traditional Canadian parties in the process. In the 1980 federal election, for instance, the Rhinoceros party nominated a professional clown/comedian named Sonia "Chatouille" Coté ('chatouille' means tickles in French, while 'côté' means side) in the Laurier riding in Montréal. Coté came in second place, after the successful Liberal candidate, but ahead of both other major parties: the third place New Democrat, and the fourth-place Progressive Conservative candidate. Chatouille received almost twice as many votes as the PC candidate. Political successors The party disbanded in 1993, when it chose to boycott that year's federal election due to new rules that deregistered any political party that did not run candidates in at least 50 ridings at a cost of $1,000 per candidature. 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 $1,000 candidate registration fee was a financial hardship. The party disbanded shortly thereafter. 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. 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) 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% ***************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************Help the Rhinos become a registered political party in Canada again!! The enrollment of a specified number of members to a party is required by Elections Canada before that party can become eligible to endorse candidates – so if after visiting this website, you want to see Rhinoceros candidates in upcoming federal elections, please sign up to become a member. We can't do it without you. Members still needed: 1000 Join today. We need 1,000 members to form an official party. E-mail your name and contact info to Mark at markbrown5934@yahoo.ca
LINKS
RHINO PARTY WEBSITE HIJACKED!!!
BUY VOTES?
THE PARTY PARTY OF CANADA
THE UNDECIDED PARTY OF CANADA
PRESSING INTERNATIONAL CRISIS
MONSTER RAVING LOONY PARTY
Elections Canada Party Registration Form
