The Rhinoceros Party, officially the Parti Rhinocéros Party, is a Canadian federal-level political party. It originally existed from 1963 to 1993. It was refounded in Montreal on May 21, 2006, and was recognized by Elections Canada as an official political party on August 23, 2007. It was known as neorhino.ca until 2010, when the party changed its name, registering a new party logo.
The party was founded by François "Yo" Gourd, who was involved with the original incarnation of the First Rhinoceros Party. He has said that he named the new party (then under the name "neorhino") for the Rhinoceros Party and for Neo, the Matrix character. The party is led by Sébastien Côrriveau (who used the names "Sébastien CôRhino Côrriveau" and "Sébastien CoRhino" when running in the 2015 and 2019 federal elections, respectively). It promises, like its predecessor, not to keep any of its promises if elected.
Rhinoceros Party of Canada (1963–1993)
The Rhinoceros Party () was a registered political party in Canada from the 1960s to the 1990s. Operating within the 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 Rhinos were started in 1963 by Jacques Ferron, "Éminence de la Grande Corne du parti Rhinocéros". 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 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".
Some members of the Rhino party would call themselves Marxist-Lennonist, a parody of the factional split between the Communist Party of Canada and the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), although the Rhinoceros Party meant the term in reference to Groucho Marx and John Lennon.
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.
Policies and politics
In addition to the national platform promises released by the party leadership, individual candidates also had considerable freedom to campaign on their own ideas and slogans. 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 too" Sharp ran in Flora MacDonald's Kingston and the Islands riding with the campaign slogan "Fauna, not flora", promising to give fauna equal representation. He also took a stand on abortion (promising, if elected, never to have an abortion) and capital punishment: "If it was good enough for my grandfather, then it's good enough for me". To strengthen Canada's military, Sharp planned to tow Antarctica north to the Arctic Circle: "Once we have Antarctica, we'll control all of the world's cold. If another Cold War starts, we'll be unbeatable".
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".