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| Sure... I'll run under the banner of the now defunt Rhinoceros Party. Quote: 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."
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 then-controversial abortion issue was clear: "If elected, I promise to never have an abortion." Party Member (and singer) Michel Rivard once went on tv (during free air time given to political party) and stated: "I have but two things to say to you: Celery and Sidewalk. Thank you, good night."
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,
-reducing the speed of light because it's much too fast,
-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 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 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 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 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 (it runs under the St-Lawrence seaway).
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" Côté ('chatouille' means tickles in French) in the Laurier riding in Montréal. Côté 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.
Early in the party's history, when it was mainly composed of French-speaking Québécois, they chose as their official translator a party member who was the only unilingual anglophone party member at the time.
Although not recognized in the United States, former baseball pitcher Bill Lee ran for President of the United States in 1988 on the Rhinoceros Party ticket. |  SD |
11-29-2005, 06:58 AM 
lol: SIGN ME UP!! That's GREAT!!! 
I am seriously considering entering the 'Edible Ballot Society' ( http://edibleballot.tao.ca/ )
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