Forbidden Donut

Rhinoceros Party of Canada

Operating within the Canadian tradition of political satire, the Rhinoceros Party's basic credo, their so-called primal promise, was "a promise to keep none of our promises." They then promised outlandishly impossible schemes designed to amuse and entertain the voting public.

The party, which claimed to be the spiritual descendants of Cacareco, a Brazilian rhinoceros who was 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. 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."

Some members of the Rhino party would call themselves Marxist-Lennonist (a parody of the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada), in reference to Groucho Marx and John Lennon.


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." In the 1988 election, the Rhinoceros Party ran a candidate named John Turner in the same riding as Liberal leader John Turner, and received 760 votes. Penny Hoar, a safe sex activist, distributed condoms in Toronto while running under the slogan "Politicians screw you — protect yourself."

Other platform promises of the Rhinoceros Party included:

Repealing the law of gravity
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
Tearing down the Rocky Mountains so that Albertans could see the Pacific sunset
Making Montreal the Venice of North America by damming the St. Lawrence River
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 eliminate foreign control of Canada's natural resources
Ending crime by abolishing all laws
Paving the Bay of Fundy to create more parking in the Maritimes
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
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 in watercolour so that Canadian fish would know where they were at all times
Banning guns and butter, since both kill
Banning lousy Canadian winters
Renaming the country Nantucket
Donate a free rhinoceros to every aspiring artist in Canada


^All Wiki'd^
Read this on a friends blog and found it funny.