Crikey. Stephen Harper is taking the maple leaf off the uniforms of Canadian army officers and replacing them with fiddly bits straight from Carry On up the Khyber/the British Army.

Seriously, our soldier’s shoulders will have “pips” on them, whatever pips are. But one thing is certain, they do sound silly. Army ranks will revert to a colonial level, the CBC reports, with the rank of private pretty much replaced with “trooper, bombardier, fusilier, rifleman or guardsman.”

To this Canadian, “trooper” is a great 1970s band, a “bombardier” is a big northern snowmobile/Quebec maker of Toronto subway cars, a “fusilier” is someone who died in the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, and a “guardsman” is someone E.M. Forster would bring back to his flat for a hearty handshake. A pip is something you find in your grapefruit.

As for the CBC, they may call themselves “CBC” now but soon Harper will rename them “Her Majesty’s Voice.” Canada Post will become “Consignia,” the former new name of Britain’s Royal Mail which went back to “Royal Mail” because Brits thought “Consignia” was just too stupid. Brits laugh a lot. It’s their best quality. If only we could borrow their habit of “taking the piss” and use it on our politicians.

But now that Britain’s Conservatives have decided, Thatcher-like, to sell off the re-re-named Royal Mail, perhaps we can royalize Canada Post. Harper likes royalty, which is why in 2011 he changed the Air Command back to “Royal Canadian Air Force.”

Lester Pearson’s efforts to build Canada’s new identity are being reversed by Harper. Never was a PM more built for retro. But Harper’s problem is that he doesn’t understand the past, and certainly not foreigners.

Foreign travel often liberates emotions best kept in check, as Jeeves once said, and Harper has been travelling a lot lately, with his little armoured car on a separate plane. (Like William and Harry, they do not fly together.)

Harper, perhaps because he only meets diplomats, thinks Britain is still steeped in the 1950s, dull, racist and jam-packed with cardiganned white people with the obedience level of East Germans. It is the Britain described in David Kynaston’s Modernity Britain, the latest in a wonderful series of populist histories that has now reached 1957.

The Brits moved on, as did Canada. They had Carnaby Street, we had Expo 67. Britain copies us now, as I noticed when watching the new BBC TV thriller, The Fall, based on Col. Russell Williams, the Canadian pedophile and killer.

But there’s Harper, copying David Cameron by cutting back madly on immigration, categorizing hellish countries as “safe” and delaying visas to such an extent that tourists give up and visit the Grand Canyon instead.

Modernity Britain makes the Canadian reader feel dipped in snobbery, like candle wax. Television was an “idiot box” and “coloureds” were requested not even to ask to rent an apartment. London is now one of the coolest and most multicultural cities in the world. I don’t know why Harper wants to replicate the exhausted, racist wreck it was postwar but that is the sensation I get when I hear about his hunger for royal pips, what ho.

Fetishizing World War I history just reminds many of Canada’s newer citizens of an imperial past they came to Canada to escape, as the Star’s Bob Hepburn wrote recently. Perhaps that’s why Harper so loved the Afghanistan war. There’s Harper, the colonial blimp in the scarlet uniform and white helmet that so attracts sniper bullets in the mountain passes, the one who thinks Afghanistan has Zulus. Someone had blundered.

You can’t build Canada’s image of itself by diving into retro-Brit. You can only forge ahead with industries that go beyond hewing wood and drawing water. You hand more cash to the uniting force of the CBC. You spend money on soft power: the Canadian talent for music, art and literature, our hard-won reputation as peacemakers, our famed politeness.

I’d like to see the maple leaf everywhere, and the correct one this time, from the native sugar maple. Instead I see a Norway maple and a British queen with that gormless King Charles in the offing. They mean nothing to me.

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Harper loves it. He bows his head.

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