The Rhinoceros Party is a registered political party in Canada. 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".
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They then promised outlandishly impossible schemes designed to amuse and entertain the voting public.
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The Rhinos were started in 1963 by Jacques Ferron, "Éminence de la Grande Corne du parti Rhinocéros". In the 1970's, 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 Elliott Trudeau in his Montreal seat.
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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, 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".
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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 Marxist-Leninist Party, although the Rhinoceros Party meant the term in reference to Groucho Marx and John Lennon.
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As seen at right, the party use 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.
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