Walking along the Songhees waterfront one day, I came across a young couple making out on a bench.
Not just necking but really putting their backs into it, moaning and squirming like Mike Duffy at a Senate hearing.
Other passersby, anxious to avoid eye contact with the passionate pair, found something to stare at on their phones as they scurried past. Me, I tried to be helpful: “Lift with your knees! Can I hold your glasses?”
This little scene came to mind when reading about the Burnaby mayoral candidate whose platform includes a ban on public displays of affection, including kissing at weddings and holding hands on the street.
Finally, a candidate with a sense of humour, right? Alas, no, she’s as serious as Ebola.
It wasn’t always thus. Elections used to be peppered with candidates whose platform planks were as warped as they were necessary, a gentle reminder to voters to take all promises and politicians with a grain of salt.
In 1940, comedian Gracie Allen ran for U.S. president vowing to refrain from kissing babies “until they’re over 21.” In mid-20th-century France, frequent presidential candidate Ferdinand Lop called for Paris to be moved to the countryside so that residents could breathe fresh air. (When one of his meetings drew the angry attention of the Nazis during the Second World War, Lop climbed out a window declaring, “We do not retreat. We advance backward for strategic purposes.”) In Britain, Screaming Lord Sutch, founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, ran for Parliament 39 times before his death in 1999.
The Loonies elected a house cat as Sutch’s successor, one who supposedly wanted to reduce class sizes by “standing kids closer together.” He also proposed draining Loch Ness to see if there really was a monster inside. Unfortunately, this new leader, Cat Mandu, was run over by a car in 2002, robbing the U.K. of his sweeping political vision and considerable mousing skills.
(It should be noted that Britons have a healthy respect for eccentricity: In 2002, the people of Hartlepool elected the local soccer team’s mascot, H’Angus the Monkey, as mayor. The monkey was re-elected twice, even though he was unable to deliver on his promise of free bananas for schoolchildren.)
In Canada, the Parti Rhinoceros (which took its name from a zoo rhino that was elected mayor of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1959) thundered across the Great White North through the 1970s and ’80s, promising to ban winter, repeal the law of gravity and count the Thousand Islands to ensure none were missing. The party also had a plot to breed a mosquito that would only hatch in January so that “the little buggers will freeze to death.”
The Rhinos were popular enough to be taken slightly seriously. In 1984, I knew a Rhino campaign manager who was sitting in a bar, working on election strategy one pint at a time, when a Conservative backroom strategist marched up and plunked a few hundred bucks on the table. The Tory figured any votes the Rhinos earned would be siphoned from the incumbent New Democrat MP, and the money might help. Not a bad idea in theory, but in practice the cash never left the bar.
Sadly, the fun came to an end with the arrival of federal election rules requiring a $1,000 deposit from each candidate, a move that pushed Canada’s domestic Rhino population into extinction in 1993.
A scaled-down group of Rhinos emerged in the 2011 election, entering a dozen races in Quebec, one in Alberta and one in B.C., where their candidate, a student/lifeguard in Prince George, advocated installing airbags in the Toronto Stock Exchange to soften future market crashes. Still, that effort was just a faint echo of the raucous past, which is too bad.
Canada has a fine tradition of satire — humour found in the gap between the world as it is presented and how it really is — running from Stephen Leacock to Rick Mercer. There is real value in balancing the bluster, anger and hubris of politics with the cheerful skepticism of those who lampoon the powerful and let a bit of air out of the self-inflated. Sometimes, it’s good to counter passion with a little laughter.
