I was pissed off. I'd been patiently accumulating material on Jean-Serge Brisson for weeks, preparing a comprehensive posting on him, trying to do a professional job and,
THAT DAMN LUMBERGH SCOOPED ME JUST A FEW DAYS BEFORE I COULD . . . Ahem . . . sorry. Start again.
What I of course meant was that just before I was in a position to start a discussion thread on Brisson my esteemed colleague Bill Lumbergh saved me the trouble by posting the question "Any of you tax-oriented folks hear of this guy before?" Well, yes, but I was not yet ready to discuss Brisson's tax beliefs. So I posted the non-tax stuff and PM'd Bill telling him that I'd post Brisson's tax views once I found out what they were but I asked him to keep any questions about Brisson to himself for a while.
Why the secrecy and hesitation? Because I had registered for Brisson's September 15th "Tax Collection Is SLAVERY Tour" seminar in New Westminster and I didn't want any hints leaking out that he was going to have an undercover visit. Then again maybe he couldn't care less as long as he got my $30. When I got there it turned out secrecy was unnecessary, Brisson couldn't care less. He said he welcomed the chance to tell the truth to government employees and skeptics. It says right on the cover of his book "All Governments Invited".
This is the announcement of the seminar that twigged my interest;
http://private-person.com/blog/2014/08/ ... very-tour/
To answer Bill's question. No, before I saw the seminar promotion I'd not heard of Brisson. I had a thirty-five year career in the Canada Revenue Agency, some of it dealing with Detax types and other fringe characters, but Brisson was new to me. Maybe my ignorance was because I was on the west coast, 2,500 miles away from him, maybe because senior management put a lid on any information about him to stop staff from resigning en-mass when they found out what they might be facing, or possibly just because he is a nobody.
Frankly a seminar on his tax avoidance beliefs was not, in the absence of any idea what they were, compelling enough to drag me out to the far end of New Westminster. From what I could see from the promotion he focused on refusing to collect GST (Goods and Service Tax; essentially a federal value-added tax) or the provincial sales tax. Neither of interest to me, I'm an income tax guy. However the promotion said to register at
clear@clearfreedom.org. CLEAR (Common Law Education and Rights Initiative) is David-Kevin: Lindsay's organization. For those of you who don't know about Lindsay (and shame on you if you don't) you can get up to speed by reviewing this labour of love compiled by a besotted admirer;
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=10022
Lindsay is the instigator of many court decisions and actions. Just check him out in paragraphs 100-108 of Meads v Meads, and the Quatloos discussion. In spite of all this activity he has, apart from some videos, no internet presence. No website, Facebook, twitter account, discussion groups, papers for general distribution, squat. At least nothing that I have been able to find. Perhaps he follows our discussions about him on Quatloos, then again perhaps not. Maybe he pays no attention to the net at all. Who knows?
Lindsay was the deciding factor in my attendance. If CLEAR was involved it meant there was a good chance that the Unlicensed Man would be there flogging his publications and I wanted some! So I signed up. When I registered I got an email back from David himself saying he would see me there. So, for the amazingly low price of $30, I had the chance to meet the Unlicensed Man himself, buy some of his books, and hear Jean-Serge's secrets that terrified the CRA and will get me out of paying taxes. In aggregate, good enough for me!
I arrived at the hall a few minutes early. Small hall on a side street in a quiet corner of a Vancouver bedroom community. David Lindsay was there looking very casual in jeans and a checked shirt. I chatted with him for a few moments at the book table, a dynamic personable guy, but he was busy with books, setting things up, greeting at door etc. So I bought some books and took a seat.
One of the available books was what must have been Dave's major offering, a massive $75 tome called "The Criminal Charging Procedure" described as "An analysis of the procedures for laying criminal charges on your own - with emphasis on charging government officials who break the law. Give 'em a fair trial.....then.....throw away the Key!!!". That thought must have hooked the guy ahead of me at the table. He bought one but he was concerned he wouldn't understand it and asked Dave if he was available to help if he ran into trouble. Absolutely! He had Dave's contact information and could get in touch any time he had problems. That's service! I picked up a copy of "Rights Denied! How your government has stolen Your Right to use Your Highways You pay for!", described by our Quatloosian fan club as "an extremely important document in the evolution of OPCA thinking in Canada."
Seating was three rows of folding chairs at the stage end of the hall. Turnout was about thirty people who, by and large, seemed to know each other. Some younger ones but generally middle age and up. More men than women but a reasonable mix. At seven Dave got up front and introduced Brisson. Both Dave and Brisson very good speakers. I had a superficial impression of Brisson from his website, something of a crank. As I said in a prior post;
As the website shows he is much, much, more than a tax avoidance crank. He's a multifaceted individual who is also an anti-UN, anti-light rail, and anti-green agenda crank. And, if you want videos, he's got videos, go nuts! I'm going to give them a miss.
Standing in front of you he is nothing like that. Personable, reasonable, engaging, a dynamic speaker with a well planned and plotted out presentation. He focused on a specific topic and didn't deviate from it. None of Glenn Fern's agonizing speaking style of stops and starts, rants, and endless loops of ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. I'd rate Brisson as one of the better, more polished speakers I've heard.
Unfortunately the topic of his presentation was of no interest to me.
His entire talk, two hours of it, was about a 1991 squabble he had with the Ontario sales tax (PST) people and the federal GST people. That's about it. The book covers exactly the same issue in even more detail. His overall complaint is that he, and other business owners, are compelled to collect GST and provincial sales tax, remit them to the government, and keep detailed records for potential audit. They get some compensation but very little, certainly only a fraction of the value of the time they have to spend on it. This is the slavery he talks about in the title to his seminar. Actually, without agreeing to the term "slavery", I can sympathize with his viewpoint. I know some small business owners here in BC that complain frequently, and with cause, about all the time they have to put in as unpaid tax collectors. However of no interest to an income tax guy like me.
Notwithstanding his opposition to all the free government work he had to do Brisson faithfully did as required, always filing his monthly reports on time until one month, because of press of business, he was a few weeks late. This resulted in a fine of $49.12 which he refused to pay. Things escalated from there, possibly more dramatically in the telling than at the time. We went through every letter, every document, every conversation leading to his trial for refusing to file. He sent the sales tax office a two page single space letter of defiance and he read the whole thing out verbatim although it, and almost every other relevant document, is reproduced in the book.
Thing escalated until he went to trial in 1994 for failing to file his GST returns. He won! Well, in a way. While he was charged with failing to file two returns the government wanted him convicted for not filing ten returns. Judge quite correctly allowed only the two returns actually in the charge. He was found guilty and fined $2,000 and he agreed to file the returns. Where is the win? To quote from the book;
. . . during the whole trial, all that the government asked for was that the returns be completed. You never specified how they had to be completed. Since he doesn't collect the taxes, he will mark that section of the return as zero collected, and he will mark how much remitted as also zero. He will sign it and that will fulfill his obligation. You cannot even charge him with a false statement or anything else. Because on his invoices, he indicates that he doesn't collect the taxes. He will not be giving a false return. The only thing left to do is charge him for not having collected the taxes, but that is where the issue of slavery will be brought up.
They had purposely laid this charge so that I would give in and start collecting the GST. They actually thought that if I was forced to do the returns, I would start collecting this tax. . . . . Revenue Canada would walk out of the this courtroom in a worse shape than before the trial. Because once the public discovered that the public could do the same as me, the department would be the laughing stock of the nation. They were now back to square one in getting me to collect their taxes.
That was my victory.
I guess you find victories where you can but over twenty years later he is still the lone voice in the wilderness and Canadian businesses still collect the taxes.
He ended with a rousing exhortation how we, the thirty people in the hall, and the rest of the Canadian population, could kick the props out of the entire extortionist systems of GST and provincial sales tax and collapse the entire tax system in Canada. How? By buying his book and voluntarily paying the taxes on it ourselves! Try and follow along with me, I'm not sure I got it right and I'm not going to read the book to find out.
GST and PST are collected by the final vendor on behalf of the purchaser. However they are legally the liability of the final purchaser. Brisson didn't charge us GST or PST on the book that came with the seminar but our obligation to pay, like his obligation to collect, still remains. So he says we should pay it ourselves. If the federal and provincial governments accept the money
FROM US, rather than him, then they have admitted that we purchasers, rather than Brisson the vendor, have to remit the tax and he and all other Canadian vendors are off the hook. So all vendors across Canada can stop collecting these taxes and stop recording sales. That leaves the responsibility for paying these taxes for every single thing I purchase to me. Not, in my opinion, an obvious advantage. But Brisson says that there is no way that the Crown can marshal the resources to go after and audit every Canadian's purchases. True enough, that is why they make the vendor collect. So if we final purchasers all initially voluntarily pay the taxes to prove that the vendors don't have to collect it then if all thirty three million or so Canadians, just stop paying GST and PST, the entire system will collapse. At least that is how I understood his point. He said that he had field-tested this theory and proven it to be correct. A customer had done exactly as he suggests; bought the book, marched over to the tax office, and demanded that they accept payment of his taxes owing on the purchase. And they did! What more do you need than that!
To aid us in this he had copies of blank invoices from Independent Radiator we could fill out ourselves. He said that anyone who bough his book could get his own invoice along with it. Fill it out, go down to the GST and PST offices, and demand they accept your payments. So get to it Canada, buy those thirty three million copies of Brisson's book, I bought mine!
His book goes into some post-1991 interactions with the CRA. Not entirely sure what, haven't read it, something about a property seizure and a failed attempt to get it back at trial. He spun a victory of sorts out of that because the judge ordered the return of some equipment that didn't belong to him.
And that was it. His big secret on how "he successfully refused to collect PST and GST" was that he just simply refused. If you are willing to take your chances on the consequences you can do the same. No analysis of tax law, no reference to jurisprudence, no Freeman strategies or beliefs, no tax avoidance schemes or advice on how I could reduce my personal income tax bill, just a recitation of events from twenty-three years ago. Very well presented but nothing that couldn't be told in ten minutes. I'm assuming that this single-minded focus on an event that happened almost a quarter century ago is the reason, as I commented earlier, that Brisson is such a polished self-confidant speaker. He's a one-trick pony who has been telling and retelling the same story for over twenty years.
After Brisson was done David came up for a final, short, rally the troops plea. Dave talked about the great meetings that they used to have in Vancouver that had faded away. The rest of the audience seemed to have a shared past because, while I had no clue what these meetings were about, everyone else seemed to know. Get them going again! Start committees, discussion groups, get into action. Kept it short and to the point.
After it was all finished I had a short chat with David. I told him that Dean Clifford would have been well advised to have taken David's offer of help. At a minimum he wouldn't have made that boneheaded error of filing a motion at the Federal Court of Canada, a court that has no jurisdiction whatever over any of Dean's problems. He agreed, saying that Dean had made a lot of mistakes. No dispute there. He thinks that Dean will be tried on the gun charges starting in the next month or so but will not be sentenced for any additional time for it. Not because he is innocent but because, when it is finally over, he will have already put in so much time in remand he'll get off with time served. A reasonable assumption. I asked him if he was doing any presentations in the Vancouver area in the foreseeable future. Unfortunately not. He is doing a web cast sometime soon but he say he is so stretched for time that personal speaking is out for a while. So it seems, after twenty or so largely futile years of fighting the oppressor, including jail time for failing to file tax returns, he is still fully committed to the fray. That was certainly my impression, a True Believer!
With that I headed home. Overall an interesting enough experience but it added nothing to my knowledge of the Canadian tax protester movement.
