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The bouquet could be bugged.

An officer could pose as a friend of the bride's family, surreptitiously taking notes behind the massive flower arrangements. "Bride doesn't look nervous enough," she might write. Maybe the Wedding Spy Agency can be equipped with some zirconium-detecting device that seeks out fake diamonds on wedding rings.

The Harper government's decision, announced yesterday, to deploy clandestine teams to foreign countries to uncover fraudulent marriages, arranged simply to facilitate immigration, has a noble intention. Keep the process fair. Save unsuspecting citizens from being duped into marriages, only to be dumped when the immigrant spouse gets his or her Canadian passport. Prevent broken hearts! Save people money!

They could not have foreseen the comedic possibilities.

I just can't get the image of Stephen Harper in drag as a bridesmaid out of my head. With his slimmed-down physique, he is dressed in a big pouffy gown that matches his icy blue eyes. He is tucking a piece of wedding cake into his sash for later forensic investigation into the investment of time and cost in its composition. Our leader is on the front line of the government's work, diligently trying to figure out what is really in people's hearts: true love or easy entry into the country.

The whole thing is laughable for other reasons, too. Who can ever tell which marriages are the real thing and which are not? The scale of the ceremony is never a good indication.

Consider the nuptials of Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Charles in the summer of 1981. Her silk confection of a dress with its 10,000 pearls and 25-foot train seemed pretty convincing that this was a match made in heaven. But, arguably, there was fraud at some level in the fact that he was in love with Camilla and the princess was courted for her king-making womb.

All wedding pageantry is theatre, designed to sprinkle fairy dust upon the heads and minds of those who are invited to observe it. I can think of many people, now divorced, who would say their former marriages - celebrated at the time with great fanfare and expense - were a sham from the get-go. They knew the union was a fraud-of-the-heart in the moment of truth - right as they walked down the aisle, gazed upon their spouse-to-be, and realized it was too late to back out. Countless people have told me they knew their marriages were all wrong on the honeymoon.

The truth about marriage is that it's hard for even the participants to know if they really love their betrothed. It's easy to be "in love," of course, but far harder to love.

Everyone is on best behaviour when in I-want-to-be-married mode. The only way to know for sure if real love exists would be to ask people to take a lie-detector test at the altar when they are required to say "I do."

As if intuiting the zeitgeist about the existence (or not) of real-love matrimony, Hollywood - that great pulse-taker of the Western world - has a new trend for marriages gone wrong: Cite fraud. It's right up there with baby bumps as the thing to do. If nothing else, it ramps up the sympathy (read: good publicity) quotient for the wronged party.

In March, Pamela Anderson had her marriage to Rick Salomon, the co-star in Paris Hilton's sex tape, annulled due to fraud. Which prompted commentators at the time to wonder if he should have been the one to cite that reason, since she is known to have fake parts.

In 2005, Oscar winner Renée Zellweger had her marriage to country singer, Kenny Chesney, annulled, also due to fraud. They had married four months after meeting. Their union also lasted only four months.

The use of the word "fraud" caused a stir. What could have been the real reason? Mr. Chesney felt compelled to quell rumours that he was gay by going on 60 Minutes to deny it. A spokesperson for the couple backpedalled gamely by offering an explanation that the split was caused by "the miscommunication of the objective of their marriage from the start."

Icing on a burnt cake, if you ask me.

"Fraud in those Hollywood cases sounds to me like [the involvement] of the Catholic Church," comments Gerald Sadvari, a top Toronto divorce lawyer at McCarthy Tétrault. "You can get an annulment because a person turned out to be different than you expected. Maybe he's not a nice person or she behaved badly. It's about a misrepresentation of character, which is a basis for annulment in the Catholic Church.

"[But] it's a misuse of the word fraud," he continues. "It's really someone saying, 'I made a mistake and so I want to end this union.'... In Hollywood, they can allege that the person, from the moment that they talked about marriage right up to and through the ceremony, had something else other than marriage in mind. They were marrying for a step-up in fame or for money. That's still not fraud in any sense that I understand it."

Just imagine if the Wedding Spy Agency could interrogate all couples about whether they had any ulterior motives in marrying each other. Anna Nicole Smith would have had to deny (for the umpteenth time) that she married J. Howard Marshall, the billionaire who was 63 years her senior, for his money. Heather Mills would have to say that Paul McCartney's fame and fortune did not inform her decision to enter their ill-fated union. Women of a previous generation, who didn't have many career opportunities, would have to deny that they married young in order to leave their parents' home. Women of a younger generation would have to deny that the reason they got married was because they wanted children and were finally ready to have them.

"We're not, any of us, pure," acknowledges Mr. Sadvari. "It's a matter of degree."