By Katie Stobbart (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: October 16, 2013
What if you didn’t have to pay taxes? What if someone told you there was a way—even an easy way—to opt out of all the things you find unjust or unpleasant about society? Getting a driver’s license. Paying fines and parking tickets. Paying the mortgage on your house. You wouldn’t have to do any of that.
I can see how it might be appealing to many people. All of us probably have something, a law or lack thereof, we disagree with or would like to change. There are obligations that come with participation in society it would be nice not to have to fulfill. I have certainly pondered the question of autonomy before. Are we really free? Do we have full jurisdiction over our own actions?
According to the Freeman-on-the-Land movement (FotL), we are not free – unless we choose to be. Freemen believe all statutory law is a contract to which an individual must consent for it to be applicable. They allege the birth certificate is essentially a contract; they claim it is a trick played by the government to steal ownership of children from their parents.
Fortunately, according to FotL, it is possible to get out of this contract, as it was entered under false pretenses. The axis of the movement is that by revoking use of one’s legally-represented identity (usually by use of a self-made affidavit or similar document), the real person withdraws his or her consent to be accountable to government within a given nation. Those who have done so refer to themselves as “sovereign citizens” or freemen; refuse to pay taxes, mortgages, and fines; and decline the use of birth certificates, driver’s licenses, social insurance numbers, etc.
[pullquote]“You can’t just declare yourself autonomous. You can’t just take over someone’s house and declare it a sovereign nation.”[/pullquote]
One problem with this is that separating the two identities while remaining a citizen is an impossibility; a citizen is a legal member of a country. By refusing to be recognized as a “person” under the law, the individual denies his or her citizenship and thereby renounces the protection of his or her rights by the nation. The idea of being a sovereign (self-governing) citizen, then, is inherently oxymoronic.
Is it considered legally valid to cut all document-based ties with society? This is a source of friction. Freemen believe it is; the law believes it isn’t. But it’s not just a matter of taxes and parking tickets. FotL might even seem relatively harmless but for the fact that the actions of self-proclaimed freemen affect people who are wilful and law-abiding citizens.
Recently, Mario Antonacci (a.k.a Andreas Pirelli), a self-described freeman took over the home of a retiree in Alberta under the pretense of renting it out, and declared it a “sovereign embassy.” He gutted the house, changed the locks, and refused to pay rent – additionally, he put liens on the property and reportedly sent the owner, Rebekah Caverhill, a bill for work done to the home. In this case, Antonacci was eventually arrested after two years of occupying the residence, and will face assault charges related to a separate incident with a landlord in Montreal, but Caverhill will have to deal with the liens in court.
After Antonacci was arrested at the end of September, Caverhill toured the home. One of the rooms in the basement had a sign on the door reading “Core Meeting Room of The First Nations Sovran Embassy of Earth.”
“It’s a war room,” Caverhill told CTV News. “It’s making war on Canada.”
In a related article by Global News, Alberta justice minister Jonathan Denis expressed his frustration with FotL, saying he hopes to discuss what can be done to protect taxpayers.
“When it comes to Freemen, I frankly have really had it with these people. They are taking up resources with our courts that could be used for legitimate civil or criminal cases, and this isn’t a new thing either,” Denis said.
This is not the first case in Canada involving FotL, and warnings have been circulated in the legal sphere as well as in the RCMP. In the US, the FBI “considers sovereign-citizen extremists as comprising a domestic terrorist movement which, scattered across the United States, has existed for decades,” according to a law enforcement bulletin released in 2011. FotL has also raised issues in the UK.
The question on the surface seems to be: how do we, as a society, deal with law-breaking freemen?
However, I hope to see our encounters with FotL take on a deeper discourse. What are the roots of this ideology and how do we deal with individuals who don’t want to be a part of society in the context of the modern world, where it is essentially impossible to get off this ride. The physicality of invisible political boundaries, the notion that land is owned by nations and/or individuals, means there is no place to escape to – you can’t just run into the woods and live off the land because it already belongs to someone else.
Our society is certainly flawed. It contains many examples (even in its own founding) of injustice. But creating more of those examples is not an effective way to resolve those injustices. You can’t just declare yourself autonomous. You can’t just take over someone’s house and declare it a sovereign nation – Europeans did it, and I think most of us can agree that was wrong and had terrible consequences. What we can do is endeavour to create change within the parameters of society in the hope that there will be fewer injustices.
We are not totally free. We are not sovereign. We are not separate from the system into which we were born—birth certificate or no birth certificate—and which formed our adult selves. But ultimately, as individuals, we are still held accountable for our actions.
You can refuse to pay taxes or drive without a license. You can cause trouble and distress for innocent people. In the end, though, you will have to own up to the consequences.
