The best solution is to use both <meta http-equiv="refresh" and <link rel="canonical" href=
It works very well, Google Bot reindexed my entire website under new links without losing positions. Also the users are redirected to the new posts right away.
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://konradpodgorski.com/blog/2013/10/21/how-i-migrated-my-blog-from-wordpress-to-octopress/">
<link rel="canonical" href="http://konradpodgorski.com/blog/2013/10/21/how-i-migrated-my-blog-from-wordpress-to-octopress/" />
Using <meta http-equiv="refresh" will redirect each visitor to the new post.
As for Google Bot, it treats <link rel="canonical" href= as 301 redirect, the effect is that you get your pages reindexed and that is what you want.
I described whole process how I moved my blog from WordPress to Octopress here.
http://konradpodgorski.com/blog/2013/10/21/how-i-migrated-my-blog-from-wordpress-to-octopress/#redirect-301-on-github-pages