This is the fall fashion week of the undeserved award, the unearned doctorate and the prizes that anyone with people-smarts would know to turn down. But they don’t.

Why? It’s partly what the philosopher Alain de Botton has described as “status anxiety,” the yearning of the social climber combined with terrible insecurity about how one is perceived by everyone else on the ladder.

It’s a heart-rending affliction but not when politicians catch it. Then it’s just hilarious. I’m looking at you, “World Statesman of the Year” Stephen Harper and soon-to-be “Doctor” Jason Kenney.

Will Harper frame the photo of himself at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City on Thursday — when he should have been at the UN — gazing giddily at a golden ball the size of a baby’s head being handed to him by a guy in a tuxedo? If only he had done a Gwyneth Paltrow Oscar speech, declared himself undeserving (too true) and cried. But no.

Statesmen talk to other world leaders, in particular the troublemakers they despise. I cannot imagine why Harper — who closes embassies or goes halfsies on them, cuts off funding, assiduously deports people, and abandons Canadian citizens in bone-littered prisons in Tehran — should think he’s a diplomat or even worldly.

It’s not just the fact that his big wooden body serves as a “flattering adjacency,” as the stylist Simon Doonan calls it, to the more unattractive leaders of the G20, or that he has helmet hair. It’s that he radiates dislike and discomfort in the presence of other humans. At least NDP leader Thomas Mulcair and Liberal MP Justin Trudeau can work a look.

I’m embarrassed when Harper visits other nations, as flummoxed as I imagine many Israelis are by Bibi Netanyahu at the UN that same day drawing in red Magic Marker on a grenade that might as well have been labelled “Acme Bomb Co.” from the Road Runner cartoons. Or was it a diagram of what to do after overdosing on Viagra? “When the red line is here, ask her to drive you to the Emergency Room.”

Saying Harper resembles a global mediator is a factual reach, like scientists saying a river must have run through Mars once because they have discovered rocks that are totally round.

And then we come to Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, who on Nov. 4. will receive a doctorate in philosophy at the Fairmont Royal York in Toronto. It will be from the University of Haifa, which hands them out with generosity, but still, did no one warn them?

Kenney graduated from Athol Murray College of Notre Dame, a private Catholic high school in Wilcox, Sask., pop. 262. He dropped out of university, so his previous brush with formal education must rest on old CNN footage of a young plump Kenney agitating to silence a pro-choice group at the University of San Francisco, despite the Catholic institution firmly disagreeing and publicly backing free speech.

If it was strange to see Kenney voting against Harper’s stated wishes in an anti-abortion manoeuvre last week, it’s equally strange to see him as a campus non-hipster of yore in a jacket and tie working assiduously to alienate eloquent, attractive female students.

The University of Haifa will give Kenney an honoris causa “in appreciation of his revered leadership” as immigration minister, among other things. The university’s advisory “tribute team” is littered with smart Canadians like John H. Tory and Harry Rosen who you’d think would have warned them to tone this bit down. This is Canada. We don’t “revere” politicians here.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Okay, the team also included Ezra Levant of Sun News and Charles McVety, the evangelical pastor — and president of Canada Christian College — who just forced the Toronto District School Board to remove a website’s link to a “filthy” Chicago teen sex-advice website that he said “teaches our children to put vegetables up each other’s rear ends.” So there’s that.

But still. Honorary degree-accepting has become something of a syndrome. Harper will win no Nobel, Kenney’s more bully than intellectual. He and Harper are making fools of themselves, and worse, of us.

Read more about: