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".
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 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.
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".
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.
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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