This is election year in Canada. The brooding piece of neoliberal nasty that is Prime Minister Stephen Harper – you know, the guy with the turret of grey hair lurking in the back at G7 meetings – will either stay or go.

I’m thinking his possible departure is the reason for a wave of gloomy reactionary monuments being hastily hammered together across the country, the worst of which is a statue of Mother Canada going up in Green Cove on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island. Cape Breton was part of Scotland before the Continental Drift had its way. It’s rocky yet green, its people good and sturdy.

And then there’s this … thing. It’s 25 metres (7.5 storeys) tall, a skinny grey lady in a long baggy garment, possibly a nightie, wearing a headscarf.

The planned statue was conceived by a Toronto businessman, Tony Trigiani, who owns a packaging company that his website says is the last word in “ham netting, nut bags, bone covers and pattie papers,” whatever those things are. Seeking a nobler legacy, he decided to honour Canada’s war dead, mainly those who drowned.

As they’ll tell you in the statuary business, it’s particularly hard to honour the drowned from dry land. So the statue is reaching out its skinny arms to sea while we try not to stare at her bony behind. It’s awkward, and will be worse in winter when ice hangs from her bony fingers and saltwater lashes her eyeballs. It’s a great site for child-scaring. Maybe it’ll ward off crows.

And what’s with Mother Canada? Aesthetics aside, Canadians don’t think of their nation as maternal. In our dark night of the soul, we call out to the north, and the north isn’t fatherly. It’s just there. When we’re ill on foreign soil, we might fondly think of Canada, implacably stationary, but we don’t get emotional about it.

Another grotesquerie is being hastily planned for the nation’s capital, Ottawa. It’s a Monument to the Victims of Communism, a huge hideous privately financed thing – it looks like an aeroplane boarding staircase – opposite the supreme court, some say planned by Harper simply to annoy chief justice Beverley McLachlin, whose court has blocked almost every punitive law he has come up with. If you follow hockey, which Canadians most emphatically do, McLachlin is our goalie.

Mother Canada's slogan is ‘if only we could have brought you home'; a more accurate one might be ‘blame water'

Public monuments need to be reasonably specific, lest quarrels begin, which they have. Communism takes as many forms as capitalism. All political systems do damage in different ways and it’s unfair to mash all the “victims” together. Similarly, Mother Canada’s slogan is: “If only we could have brought you home.” A more accurate one might be “Blame water.” What might a drowning person think, staring at her as he went under? “A lighthouse might be nice, or a rescue station. A boat. A lifesaver, a piece of wood.” Instead he has her.

There is nothing about Canada’s creepy private-sector monumentalism that isn’t Dollywood level grotesque. Take the embarrassing Trigiani chart that rates the heights of famous world statues. Ma Canada is part way between the Statue of Liberty and Rodin’s The Thinker. But isn’t everything?

The statue’s “park” is a low-rent Disneyland for adults feeling grim, a collection of paved areas with names like “Commemorative Ring of True Patriot Love” and “With Glowing Hearts National Sanctuary”. (The phrases are from our dire guys-only national anthem.) Children revel in tacky, but they will have tantrums of boredom here; teenagers will stay in the car.

We’re not a military nation. But Harper never shuts up about men in uniform. He fetishises the culture while abandoning its costly damaged soldiers. War is his game, his dream. These awkward structures are monuments to this strange, awkward angry man. May they go unbuilt before the autumn election that consigns him to history.