Come on now, confess, you are not that excited about the upcoming federal election. Whether it’s held this spring or in the fall, the adrenaline factor is about minus four.
Sure there will be the Trudeau factor, but the cute guy is struggling to find a platform and probably doesn’t care that he can’t find one. Enough voters will swoon in his favour just like their grandmothers did when his Dad, Pierre the Magnificent rode in on a canoe.
Stevie Wonder, that Harper boy is still Stevie. We all know what makes him rotate. Tommy Mulcair, Quebec’s almost favourite socialist will try to buck the trend and the Bloc Heads and Greenies will be relegated to back benches, as before. The only change will be the fact that there will be about 30 more drones in the Common House than there were before.
This makes me long for the Rhinoceros Party.
Now there was a team where you were totally assured your vote was going to be wasted, but you would have a rip roaring good time if even one of them got elected.
The Rhinos were on the political scene for 30 years but, alas, they never had an elected MP.
This is the party that could dominate the headlines with their zany platform and policy ideas, whenever they felt in a boat-rocking mood, which was often.
Rhinos, unlike Trudeau, had lots of policy ideas and they spread them liberally from 1963 to 1993, and then, like many good things, they ended their circus and Canada is poorer for it.
The Rhinos wanted to take Canada off the gold standard in favour of the snow standard.
They wanted to have an official count of the Thousand Islands, to make sure the Americans hadn’t stolen any.
They figured Canadians should move their cities closer together to save money.
Rhinos said that once they were elected as government, they would repeal the law of gravity and provide higher education by building taller schools. They would then pave the Bay of Fundy to provide more parking spaces for Maritimers and change Rue Ste - Catherine in Montreal into the world’s longest bowling alley.
This is the party that wanted to abolish all laws to end crime and were willing to provide an edict to tear down the Rocky Mountains so that Canada could have the world’s biggest gravel pit, while allowing Albertans to see the Pacific sunset.
The Rhinos wanted to ban guns and butter — both killed, and they would reform Loto-Canada by replacing the major cash prizes with Senate appointments.
They wanted to annex America, making it our newest Territory and would rule that all mosquitoes would be bred to hatch in January so the little buggers would freeze. They wanted to replace our currency with bubble gum, which was much easier to inflate and deflate. They figured our national debt should be relegated to a Visa card with minimum monthly payments.
They even wanted to declare war on Belgian because a Belgium cartoonist killed a rhino in one of his strips.They would cancel the war if Belgium delivered a case of mussels and a case of Belgian beer to the Rhino “hindquarters” in Montreal. The Belgians loved the joke and their embassy staff actually delivered those goods and averted the pretend war.
I wish our current politicians were as inventive and fun-loving as the Rhino candidates who lobbied for the word “fun” to be inserted into every piece of legislation and Acts of Parliament. Crazy? Yes. Stupid? Nope.
