I was going to post some comments on the birth certificate subject but I think almost anything I could add has been covered. One quick question though, when you ask what is the "security of the person", are you referring to the language used in the
Charter of Rights and Freedoms, s. 7:
7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.
Otherwise I have a somewhat random set of thoughts and comments.
bmxninja357 wrote:so im going to start by saying when you say 'freemen on the land belive' or some such why do you belive that? is it true? am i painted with that brush?
I personally see the Freeman-on-the-Land community as quite an amorphous one – it ranges from people who self-identify for no reason I can identify (the now ‘boxed’ Andreas Pirelli / Mario Antonacci seems a good example!), to persons who adhere to what might be called ‘orthodox’ beliefs promoted by persons who specifically identify themselves as teaching concepts and a status of that kind.
That’s broad. I sometimes on Quatloos discuss a person as exhibiting typical Freeman social interest characteristics, or advancing documents that have a clear Freeman origin – for example the classic Notice of Understanding, Intent, and Claim of Right.
If you are concerned that the term has become a catch-all used by the media and public for any old in-court oddity? Yes, that’s an issue. For example this guy (
R. v. Seagull, 2013 BCSC 1811 (
http://canlii.ca/t/g0s21) is definitely not a Freeman – he’s a One People’s Public Trust nut (and a damned unpleasant one at that.)
What I am saying in a round-about manner is that if there is a meaning to saying “I’m a Freeman-on-the-Land”, just that statement alone doesn’t tell someone much. Perhaps there will be, at some point, a clear meaning to the term – for example as an organized political party with an explicit platform of policy and belief. But at the moment it’s a term which can only have meaning with additional context.
bmxninja357 wrote:is it safe to assume that the person is in fact inseparable from the man? sure. is it also a point of law that the human and the person are separate? yup they are. modern law does not allow for the separation. its easy to see why. it could lead to inequality between sexes or races or social classes.
but person and man are actually two different things.
I think your point is a very good one, and viewed through a historical context there clearly was at one point a distinction between a human being and a human being with legal rights, which I suppose we could call “personage”. I also agree that, functionally, that in the modern legal context the two are now merged.
bmxninja357 wrote:the crown represents the people. and the crown is in fact directed(or supposed to be) by the people. thats me. and every other canadian. im not special.
but as to offer a volley, if the people of canada do not own canada(im not purposing the whole do whatcha like thing) who does?
I have a couple of thoughts on this which may (or may not) be helpful. The first is that modern government structure is an evolved rather than a designed thing, and for that reason what it is and how it operates is not always made obvious. Why are there countries? These entities have evolved from personal domains of a man, to ethnical and geographically defined regions where authority (in one sense or another) emerges from the population of those regions.
I think Thomas Hobbes probably did the most useful job of capturing “what is the Crown?” in a thematic sense; it’s a delegation of personal authority to an necessary entity that overarches and operates certain aspects of society. I think, if one were to gather a group of people together who were otherwise unorganized and let them confer on how they should set up their society that they would opt to set up Leviathan – but frame that act something like this:
- 1. I am limiting my potential use of force and giving it to the State.
2. I am limiting my direct participation in decision making on social issues via a system of representative democracy that follows these rules.
3. I am authorizing the State to engage in regulation, intrusion, and taking of my property under a set of criteria and limitations.
4. I am setting up certain institutional safeguards against State action (for example, an independent Court apparatus, or religious authority.)
… and so on.
At the end of this process and with a consensus of those people the State pops into existence. It came from the people, their delegation of authority to the State, their empowering of the State, and their voluntary subjugation and subordination of themselves to the State.
At that point the State is whatever its makers imagined it to be.
That’s neat and tidy, but of course not the way we got where we are. The modern State has emerged from many different contexts – sometimes from a kingship that evolved into this supra-personal thing we call the Crown, in other cases strictly as an embodiment of the will of the people. But in the end, oddly enough, many countries look pretty much the same.
Do we own the State? No, but historically we made it. Can we unmake the State? The rotting corpses of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu would suggest so.
In its better moments the State is a symbiote for its host population. Sometimes it’s just a parasite that operates for the benefit of a few. But in either case, it stands alone and apart from the population. In Canada the Courts have an analogous, free-standing nature, which is rather an interesting phenomenon when one considers the point. Again, an evolved product, rather than a designed one.
bmxninja357 wrote:and to answer why im a freeman on the land would take half the night. so to shorten it down i will say i think the legal system is a sham that perpetuates its own business. i think laws should be simplified and written in plain english. if ignorance of the law is no excuse then it is every mans duty to know it. the law should be so plainly written as to not require excess interpretation by someone charging by the hour.
Yep, that is a huge problem. The legal profession as a self-regulated monopoly is preposterous.
And again, the complexity of the apparatus and its rules are a consequence of the history of the legal system as an evolved rather than a designed thing. If we can’t make the system ‘knowable’, at least one could hope to make the results of the system rational and intuitive, to give the ordinary person a sketch of how things work so that they can anticipate a result without looking up the details.
In its better moments the law works that way – one reason I really like the law of contract is that a couple centuries back the British Law Lords decided to structure that domain under a single principle: whatever else, the law of contract should produce an economically efficient result. From that one basis anyone can infer a sensible, easy to understand set of rules – and most likely that will turn out to be what the courts enforce.
But there are huge domains of law where there is no hint at a rational scheme. In theory, the
Charter of Rights and Freedoms should have helped sort that out – personally I think it made things even worse. I sometimes talk to legal professionals about taking a knife to the law and seeing if radical re-workings could produce benefit. It’s interesting to me that they usually can’t even imagine taking such steps – they’re so caught up in the evolved structure of the law and all its byzantine paths.
Just one example: why in criminal matters is a judge only allowed to put limits on an accused where that person’s misconduct is proven beyond a reasonable doubt? The historical answer is simple: the sanction for a crime was traditionally physical punishment or jail – and those are such severe intrusions into a person’s rights that they only are authorized where the crime is proven to a very high confidence.
But now we have all kinds of lesser punishments: prohibitions of all kinds, various forms of community service, restricted activity outside of prison via probation and parole mechanisms. Why does it make sense to only allow those where you know, absolutely know, that a crime has occurred?
Wouldn’t it instead make sense to give judges a more flexible toolset to address the person who very probably committed a crime and therefore could benefit from some restricted form of social control? Perhaps. Can that occur in Canada? Probably not - criminal law has been committed to a certain evolutionary pathway, which arguably limits the social benefit available from a court-like process. It’s just a thought experiment, but shows how the fact law grew rather than was designed leads to its current form.
I could go on at great length on how the current appellate court obsession with procedural fairness has made the courts all but inaccessible but I suspect most on this forum are getting a little tired of me ranting about that…
bmxninja357 wrote:ask what you want but know, i do not speak for anyone but myself. and i dont think we are so different. im here to see if im right.
I believe so, and I’m glad you decided to participate here.
SMS Möwe
