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Google employee John Mueller was asked this recently in a hangout and he said that it had been a while since the last one so hopefully we get one soon.  But, no one outside of a select few at Google knows when it will happen.  It's been almost 8 months now. Matt Cutts said at a conference that 6 months was a reasonable time to wait between Penguin refreshes but that it could be significantly more.

Yeah, I'd have to agree that this is not a sanctioned use of rel="canonical". Most likely, it will do nothing at all. I doubt it would harm your site, but it's not accomplishing anything. Google is even pretty picky about placement of the tag - for example, it doesn't seem to work in the body of a page. I ran some experiments with that a couple of years ago.