Mouseland is a politicalfable first told byClarence Gillis in 1944,[1] and later and most famously byTommy Douglas, leader of theSaskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) that became theNew Democratic Party of Canada, bothsocial democratic parties. The story is about a nation of mice voting for either black cats or white cats to run their country, and expresses the CCF's view that the Canadian political system was flawed in offering voters afalse dichotomy: the choice of two parties, neither of which represented their interests.[2]
The mice voted in black cats, which represented theProgressive Conservative Party, and then they found out how hard life was. Then they voted in the white cats, which symbolized theLiberal Party and things were different, but still not good for mice, because the government was still run by cats; subsequently they alternated the two, then they tried a coalition, and ultimately spotted cats were voted in which sought to sound like mice. A mouse got an idea that mice should run their government, not the cats, was accused of being aBolshevik, and was imprisoned. The concluding point was that one can lock up a mouse or a person, but one cannot lock up anidea.
A variation of this story is told inDouglas Adams' novelSo Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, involving a democracy where people vote for lizards as their leaders. No one is happy with this situation, except for the lizards, but the people continue voting for the lizards "because if they didn't vote for a lizard ... the wrong lizard might get in".
In 2006,Brad Wall, Leader of theSaskatchewan Party, the opposition party inSaskatchewan, parodied Mouseland, a place in which the mice govern as destructive creatures, as an attack on theSaskatchewan New Democratic Party.[3] In 2010, Wall carried his parody further by giving "A Mouseland Update" to the Saskatchewan Party's Annual Convention.[4]