Charlie McKenzie used his platform in his later years to fight for the decriminalization of cannabis. Marc-Boris St. Maurice, a Quebec-based politician, says that Mr. McKenzie’s work paved the way for today’s legalization of marijuana.Andy Clark/Reuters
It will go down in Canadian electoral history as probably the most bizarre and entertaining free-time political broadcast that voters will ever witness. It was 1984 and Canada was in the midst of a general election campaign.
As upbeat music plays, a CBC announcer in a serious tone introduces the official representative of the Rhinoceros Party, its national chairman and “janitor,” Charlie McKenzie. He is seated in front of a fireplace, a middle-aged hippie with a greying beard who’s wearing a Hawaiian-style shirt, his feet on a desk laden with beer cans. Alongside him is an easel with a chart on it, emblazoned with the word, “SEX.”
“My Fellow Canadians,” Mr. McKenzie begins. He then addresses the three major questions affecting unemployed Canadians that had recently been studied by the Rhino Party’s Ronald McDonald Commission: “Should we repeal the law of gravity? Should sex, drugs and rock and roll be developed as natural resources? And last, but certainly not least, do they have any spare change?”
Mr. McKenzie then uses a fly-swatter pointed at the sex chart to explain how research has shown that economic productivity increases with the number of sexual contacts a worker has each week. “Sex is more than just good clean fun,” he declares. “It’s sound economics as well.”
This four-minute satirical masterpiece came at the peak of national influence for the absurdist political party. Mr. McKenzie was at the forefront of the movement for 15 years, using humour, limitless charm and a keen political sense to give what began as a fringe Quebec party a national imprint. Suffering from pneumonia after a stroke, he died on Jan. 5 in Thetford Mines, Que., at age 81.
“He was an extraordinarily funny guy,” said long-time friend Michael Krauss, a one-time journalist and communications specialist, noting that the Rhinos’ underlying policy was: “If elected, we will not serve.”
The party was never short of ideas. The Rhinos vowed to promote higher education by building taller schools, to pay off the national debt on an American Express card and to provide tax credits for sleeping.
The party promised to repeal the metric system to eliminate confusion, noting, “If the good Lord had intended Canada to go metric, she would have given us 10 apostles, not 12.” It also proposed abolishing the environment because it was too hard to keep clean and took up too much space.
Under Mr. McKenzie’s leadership, the Rhinos were also keenly aware of regional priorities. They undertook to tear down the Rockies so Albertans could get a better view of the Pacific Ocean and to turn Montreal’s Sainte-Catherine Street into a giant bowling alley. Once in power, the party also said it would order an official count of the Thousand Islands, to make sure the Americans hadn’t stolen any.
But the Rhinos’ overarching commitment to the public was a promise to keep none of its promises. When the short-lived government of Joe Clark fell in late 1979, Mr. McKenzie accused his opponent of political plagiarism for stealing the Rhinos’ central credo. “We were pledged to an era of indecision and incompetence. We accuse Clark of lifting that and making it Tory policy.”
Charles Michael McKenzie was born in Amherstburg, Ont., on Nov. 28, 1943, the second of three children of Lester McKenzie, an accountant, and his wife, Catherine Coyle, a postal worker. He attended local schools but dropped out of high school, joining the Canadian Army at age 16. It was in his youth that he was first bitten by the political bug and was a big supporter of prime minister John Diefenbaker.
“He never had any formal education beyond Grade 9 but he had a PhD in self-education,” his younger sister Sandra told The Globe.
According to his wife, Dominique Langevin, Charlie found the Canadian military boring so he quit and joined the U.S. Army. (He was a dual citizen.) Mr. McKenzie was stationed to Germany as a military police officer and was in Berlin on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
After leaving the army, Mr. McKenzie worked for a time in Detroit and witnessed the urban riots of 1967 that ravaged the city. After the murder of Robert F. Kennedy and the election of Richard Nixon as U.S. president in 1968, he soured on America and moved to Vancouver, where he helped set up a youth hostel. He married and had two children but the marriage didn’t last.
In the late 1970s, fascinated by the rise of the Parti Québécois, Mr. McKenzie moved to Montreal. “He heard that people were dancing in the streets,” said Ms. Langevin, who met him at a bar in 1978. They soon became a couple and remained together until his death.
Mr. McKenzie had rudimentary French but became a committed francophile, insisting on speaking it all the time, even though he kept an accent. “He learned French at the Brasserie Beaubien,” his wife said.
The couple hung out with the artists and intellectuals who were the core of the Rhinoceros Party. It was established in 1963 by Jacques Ferron, a physician, playwright and Quebec nationalist who considered the rhinoceros the personification of the perfect federal politician, “a thick-skinned, clumsy, stupid animal which loves to wallow in the mire but can move fast if he senses danger.”
At a Montreal news conference during the 1979 federal election given by François (Yo) Gourd, the party spokesman in Quebec, a bunch of English-speaking reporters turned up. According to Ms. Langevin, Mr. Gourd asked Mr. McKenzie to answer their questions. He was a natural and it launched his career, according to Ms. Langevin.
The party’s official leader was a rhinoceros, dubbed Cornelius the First, who was born at Quebec’s Granby Zoo, but Mr. McKenzie became the human face of the party, particularly outside of Quebec. He operated from the party’s “hindquarters” in Montreal.
Under Mr. McKenzie, the party fielded 120 candidates across the country in 1980 and garnering 110,286 votes nationwide, or just over one per cent of the vote, which proved to be its high-water mark. The party also did well in 1984, when Sonia Côté, a clown whose nickname was Chatouille (Tickles), came second in the Montreal riding of Laurier, behind the winning Liberal but ahead of the NDP and Progressive Conservative candidates.
The Rhinos began harbouring grander ambitions. In 1988, Mr. McKenzie recruited Bill (Spaceman) Lee, a one-time pitcher for the Montreal Expos who was famously fired after ducking out of a game and heading to a nearby bar, as the Rhino candidate for U.S. president.
“He’s America’s premier space cadet,” Mr. McKenzie said of Mr. Lee in an interview with The New York Times. Mr. Lee was chosen at a primary at a restaurant in Burlington, Vt. “We held the primary in Vermont because Vermont never had a New Hampshire primary,” Mr. McKenzie explained. The candidacy attracted lots of media attention but eventually died.
The mainstream Canadian parties became increasingly irritated by fringe competitors and in 1993 Parliament passed a bill that proved devastating for the Rhinos. The cost of registering each candidate soared to $1,000 from $200 and a party had to field at least 50 candidates nationwide before being registered, placing the Rhinos in an impossible position.
The Conservatives under Brian Mulroney were in power but Ms. Langevin, a one-time Rhino candidate herself, said it was the NDP who really had it in for the Rhinos, particularly in Quebec. “They really hated our guts,” she said. “We stole a lot of votes from them. They were snobs and condescending.”
Mr. McKenzie protested against the bill. “Enough is enough,” he said. “We will not let ourselves be Saran-wrapped and cast into the freezer of Canadian history.” But the legislation passed and the Rhinos were forced out of business. Another small party, the Communists, challenged the law on Charter grounds and a decade later, the Supreme Court threw out the law as unconstitutional.
The Rhinos have since been revived on a couple of occasions though without their past vigour. Mr. McKenzie transferred his energy and political acumen to fighting for the decriminalization of cannabis.
“Charlie was a brilliant political strategist and without him, I don’t think that marijuana would be legal today,” said Marc-Boris St-Maurice founder of the Bloc Pot, a Quebec provincial party, and later of the Marijuana Party of Canada.
The two men met in the late 1990s and later worked together at the Montreal Compassion Centre, set up by Mr. St-Maurice as a dispensary for medical marijuana, which was busted by police on a couple of occasions.
In 2004, Mr. McKenzie had a radical suggestion for his friend. He suggested that Mr. St-Maurice quit the fledgling Marijuana Party and join the federal Liberals, who were in opposition and had begun talking about the legalization of marijuana. Mr. St-Maurice took the advice and helped the Liberals craft their detailed policy on the issue, which ended up with legalization in 2018.
“He was my No. 1 political adviser. He taught me everything I know about politics,” Mr. St-Maurice said.
Mr. McKenzie also worked as a freelance journalist, writing occasionally for mainstream publications like The Globe and Mail and regularly for Hour, a Montreal alternative weekly, where he was dubbed the paper’s senior political correspondent.
“He took his work and his subject matter very seriously but he never took himself too seriously,” said Jamie O’Meara, Hour’s editor in chief until it closed in 2011.
Hour was staffed with enthusiastic young journalists, who were nevertheless thrilled every time Mr. McKenzie, already in his 60s, turned up at the paper’s newsroom. “Everybody liked him,” Mr. O’Meara said, adding that “he always used to bring us gifts of the home-grown variety.”
Mr. McKenzie and Ms. Langevin eventually retired to the tiny Quebec hamlet of Saint-Jacques-le-Majeur-de-Wolfestown, in the province’s Chaudière-Appalaches region, where he dedicated his time to landscape photography, which he published online.
Mr. McKenzie leaves his wife, Ms. Langevin; sisters, Catherine and Sandra; daughters, Kathleen and Siobhan; four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
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