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Just FYI, someone specifically asked if canonicalizing a page will prevent it from being indexed last year on Moz. It's was a good discussion. Pay particular attention to what Dr Pete has to say on the matter. Sounds like you have a plan! Great.

Selfishly, this was a great thread to get involved with. Our domain can't handle a blog so we have to do it similar to how Mike does - and ours hasn't launched yet, so I got some good confirmations to work with so we maximize the opportunity as best possible given our limitations. So, thanks for asking, Mike. And, thanks for answering, Dr. Pete!

I'm not sure. It was the first thing that popped to my mind. I'd have to spend some time googling it though as I've never actually done this.

Are the domains owned by the same central agency?  i.e. is the registration information identical? Also, are the domains hosted on the same hosting and share the same IP? If either of the above are true i would say the short answer would be "don't do it" If both of the above is false, then i would choose which site you want to have the most authority and send links from all the other sites to that one site.  I would avoid crosslinking unnecessarily between all the sites.  Overall i would work towards a 'natural' linking structure.  Try to find believable reasons to cross link between the sites.  If you are talking about elephants on one site in a blog post and you have another site that is all about elephants than that would be an excellent oportunity to crosslink.  Do it naturally.  I can't emphasize this enough.

Yes it makes sense. Incoming links do contribute to your domain as a whole, but if you're targeting competitive keywords you're likely to need some links to the pages themselves. Also, if all of your links go to one page of your website, it looks suspicious to search engines, much better to spread them out a bit. Paul