Mississauga's lone rhino

The rhinoceros. 

In reality, a powerful and surprisingly graceful creature that has somehow gained a reputation for being a lumbering behemoth with a thick skin and an even thicker skull.

It’s an image not unlike the one many of us have of the federal government—slow to action but quick to attack at the first sign of danger.

The rhinoceros was just the symbol Jacques Ferron was looking for when he came on the political scene in 1979 as a candidate in Mont Royal. The Liberal competitor in the same riding was some guy named Pierre Trudeau.

Ferron was looking for some way to make the campaign a little less tedious, and a lot less pompous. But to run as just another independent only seemed to add to the election ennui that people across Canada were feeling.

A little levity was needed and so Ferron officially declared himself a candidate for the Parti Rhinocéros. Ferron cited Beatle John Lennon and comedian Groucho Marx as his political inspirations, thus passing the new party off as a “Marxist-Lennonist” faction. Befitting an officially party, Ferron adopted a platform, and his platform was to make no political promises at all.

Ferron didn’t win. No Rhino ever did, but his party gained momentum over the ensuing elections until finally in 1988, Mississauga fielded its first ever candidate for the “Rhinoceros Party” (the party went bilingual in 1984) when a local musician, Marc Currie, declared himself in the running for the riding of Mississauga South.

To uncover more on this lone Rhino, I scanned dozens of pages of 1988 election coverage in the Mississauga News and came up with next to nothing on Currie. It seems that the local press didn’t take him too seriously. But that was the Rhinos’ campaign strategy all along.

At least some people in Mississauga South took Currie at his word (whatever it was). With 322 votes, Currie found himself with more supporters at the end of that November night than stockbroker and Libertarian candidate Vay Jonynas, or Patrick Descoteaux, whose Party for the Commonwealth-Republic bewildered more electors than even the Rhinos.

Of the 23 candidates that ran across Mississauga in the 1988 election, Currie fared better than nine others—an impressive showing for the lone Mississauga candidate whose party offered to do nothing for the city and, if elected, promised to make good to that claim.

There was more to Currie’s measured success than just indifference. 

Tory incumbent and victor Don Blenkarn was 57 years old and his toughest opponent of the night, Liberal Gil Gilliespie, was 61. Currie, by comparison, was only 26 and this had a definite appeal to young voters who, in their inceptive view preferred to vote for a rhino that for a dinosaur.

Aside from that, there were (and still are) voters out there who feel that intentionally spoiling their ballot is better than not showing up to vote at all. Absence is apathy. The Rhinos offered honest Canadians a way to make clear their disapproval of the political process.

Unexpectedly, voters nation-wide actually used the Rhinos as a party of discontent and since this was tantamount to actually having a policy and a purpose (something repugnant to old guard Rhinos) the Rhinoceros Party dissolved after the November 21, 1988 election.  

Mississauga’s three other ridings in 1988 (Mississauga East, Mississauga West and South Brampton-Malton) did not have Rhino representation, and so Currie left his mark as our city’s first and only candidate for the Rhinoceros Party.

He didn’t plan it that way. It just happened by accident. 

The Rhinos wouldn’t have had it any other way.