Robert Arthur Menard FOTL (Freeman on the Lam)

[rumpelstilzchen]

This is why I love BaLLoON-BoY BoBBy so much.

It has been such a long time since I saw that video where Bobby's audience found inspecting a balloon to be more interesting than listening to Bobby. It always made me laugh. Do you have a link to it?

[Chaos]

One day, in the summer, I may be walking down a Vancouver sidewalk and see Rob back at his old occupation of street comedian dumpster diving.

fixed

[Bill Lumbergh]

It's been posted before but it's worth posting again - we have a court decision that clearly explains what the consumer purchase scheme in the Bills of Exchange Act is actually for: Crossroads-DMD Mortgage Investment Corporation v Gauthier, 2015 ABQB 703 http://canlii.ca/t/glzx5

Spoiler: It has nothing to do with getting free food.

3. The Purpose of the Consumer Purchase Scheme

[61] The third reason I reject Gauthier’s argument is that he has fundamentally misapprehended the purpose of Part V of the Bills of Exchange Act. This is technical legislation and his misinterpretation is not surprising. The purpose of the Consumer Purchase scheme is not at all obvious when one reads ss 188-192.

[62] Sections 188-192 creates a transaction category, “consumer purchases” (s 188) and requires that a bill of exchange or promissory note that purports to document a “consumer purchase” must be prominently marked on its front: “Consumer Purchase” (s 190(1)). Otherwise, the promissory note is void (s 190(2)). Failure to mark a bill of exchange or promissory note with the notation “Consumer Purchase” is an offence (s 192)). A third party who holds a “consumer purchase” bill of exchange or promissory note is, subject to defences and set-off that would apply to the original recipient of the bill of exchange (s 191).

[63] These cryptic provisions were enacted in 1970 in response to shady practices by retailers that targeted ordinary individual consumers. Jacob S Zeigel, “Canada Regulates Consumer Notes”, (1971) 26 Bus Law 1455 at 1456 explains the scam. Unscrupulous retailers would offer purchase financing and have the buyer sign not only a contract, but also an attached promissory note that required the buyer to pay, on demand, whoever held that promissory note. These were called “tear-off promissory notes” because the usual practice was that the promissory note was attached to the ‘parent’ contract by a perforated edge to facilitate removal of the promissory note.

[64] The issue that emerged was that this arrangement permitted abuse of vulnerable consumers. Consumers who signed both a promissory note and a contract might face a demand to pay that note from a third party who received the promissory note. If so, the consumer had no basis to resist that claim, contrary to the consumer’s position during debt collection by the seller. The purchase contract created bilateral rights between the individual consumer and the seller. For example, if the seller failed to deliver a product, or delivered a defective product, then the consumer would have a defence and could refuse to pay the seller. The “consumer purchase” provisions expanded the buyer’s ‘defensive rights’ to also operate against a third party who had received the promissory note (s 191). The requirement to mark these retail promissory notes as a “Consumer Purchase” was to warn any potential third party that this was a different category of debt - someone who bought a consumer purchase tear-off promissory note could not expect to automatically collect on demand.

[65] The net effect of the 1970 amendments was two-fold. First, consumers were shielded from unfair demands for payment that flow from the usual application of the Bills of Exchange Act. Second, unscrupulous vendors and finance companies could no longer collaborate to demand payment where the vendor failed to deliver. These changes were actually welcomed by the Federated Council of Sales Finance Companies as a reasonable and appropriate step.

[66] The Bills of Exchange Act, ss 188-192 “consumer purchase” strategy was so effective that the original scam it targeted rapidly went extinct. Judicial commentary on these provisions all but disappeared, until the provisions were ‘re-discovered’ by the OPCA community decades later.

[67] This is a third independent basis on which I reject Gauthier’s consumer purchase argument. The legislative scheme provided for in Bills of Exchange Act, ss 188-192 is not intended to apply to a transaction that is documented only by a consumer purchase contract. It instead targets separate consumer notes that are intended to enforce payment of a debt under that contract.

[rumpelstilzchen]

Thanks for that. I had not seen that before. Looks like Menard will have to invent a new scam.

[Burnaby49]

To many complex words crammed into big paragraphs Bill. Menard's potential targets would have no clue what Crossroads-DMD says. However Rob telling them, in short simple sentences, why they can get free money by signing up for his imaginary ACCP debit cards might at least induce a few to take the bait.

After that last very public ACCP disaster where he got outed before he even got going I have to think that trying this yet again means that he's really on the ropes.

[ComfySlippers]

This is why I love BaLLoON-BoY BoBBy so much.

It has been such a long time since I saw that video where Bobby's audience found inspecting a balloon to be more interesting than listening to Bobby. It always made me laugh. Do you have a link to it?

Indeed, it was lovely.

Ooops, this is not the correct link:
http://www.cafepress.ca/+robert-menard+balloons

I actually have a copy of the video but never got around to finishing my... ahem... BoBBy-TriBute.
So here's someone else's unlisted Youtubey: https://youtu.be/iXZqo8p4N2Q
Bobby starts at 4:30
At 7:40 I tend to chortle.

[Burnaby49]

I finished the video and found that he's not, as yet, trying to sell his debit cards or solicit funds. He's instead trying to raise an army. If he, or anyone else, goes into a restaurant, has a meal then refuses to pay for it they run the risk of being arrested. But if he can get a thousand people to stiff a bunch of restaurants all at one time he says the owners won't have any choice but to accept his fake payment method. "So can I find sufficient people who are willing to take the risk to help make this happen or is it a nation of ninnies who just want to sit on their butt even though they know they are being screwed and will allow it to continue until someone else fixes it for them?"

Well if you are willing to stand up to the man (some guy just struggling to make a buck running a restaurant, a hard, high risk venture) then Rob has an email address at the end of the video where you can contact him and stand tall while eating well. Me? I'll stay part the Nation of Ninnies and let Rob and his stalwart crew do all the heavy lifting for me. Let us know when it's fixed Rob, it's been a while since I've dined at Bishops here in Vancouver because of the price but I'll be back at the trough as soon as you've led the way to the free food.

[ComfySlippers]

I finished the video and found that he's not, as yet, trying to sell his debit cards or solicit funds. He's instead trying to raise an army. If he, or anyone else, goes into a restaurant...
...

He's doing what he does best; regurgitating his past gibberish.
Wait a couple of years, try the same crap again.
No one will ever notice it came to nothing last time, and was demonstrated to be bollyhocks.
The new kids on the merry-go-round will think it's all new stuff.

Unfortunately for BoBBy, the intertubes are chock full of all his prior shenanigans.
He can no longer access many of them.
Even the ones he deletes out of embarrassment somehow end up preserved on someone's hard-drive.

Silly BoBBy.

[arayder]

I finished the video and found that he's not, as yet, trying to sell his debit cards or solicit funds. He's instead trying to raise an army. . . . "So can I find sufficient people who are willing to take the risk to help make this happen or is it a nation of ninnies who just want to sit on their butt even though they know they are being screwed and will allow it to continue until someone else fixes it for them?"

It's back to basics for Menard. He's trying to recruit gullibles into the freeman cult. Once there, they are a source of what Bobby needs. . . shelter, funds, adulation, beer and weed.

It's Menard working his game. He's in new location (maybe Alberta) and he's working his way through a new crop of gullibles. He had a partner who was going to help with a web radio show, but that fell through. My guess is his partner wised up pretty quickly.

But Bobby was smart enough to have other irons in the fire, hence his relationship the Hum family who I suspect he recruited, encouraged and subsequnetly promoted as true believers. I believe he's angling for a cut of the Hum family's GoFundMe money, hoping it will come back to him in the form of paid advice.

Menard knows the Hums are a limited source of funds, so he's cast his net for an army of chumps he hopes will play his freeman game. It's the same soak-the-rubes game he played in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.

It may not sound like much to us. . . a place to crash. . . a case of Moose Heads. . . a few dollars. . . some FaceBook likes, but it's all Bobby lives for.

[Bill Lumbergh]

Someone should point BoBBy's potential victims to:

Sovereign Citizen Training for Law Enforcement
by Florida Sheriffs on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/ALPs_n0WQaY

It's a new(ish) training video for and by Police Officers.

BoBBy does a cameo at 12:22

And Bobby's a star in a new academic article just published in the March edition of the Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law. The article's main focus is on how OPCA types are attacking the Canadian legal system and Menard's various past antics are used as examples. Examples of OPCA failures of course.

(b) What do OPCA Gurus Teach?

OPCA gurus teach a spectrum of responses to what is (incorrectly) perceived as unauthorized action by police, courts, lawyers, government actors, and other institutions. This review will focus on Freeman-on-the-Land guru Robert Arthur Menard. Menard is a suitable representative Canadian guru for several reasons:

The article gives five reasons why Rob's failed concepts serve as the prototype for an analysis of OPCA gibberish. This one gives him his due as the creator of all of this nonsense;

2. Menard is effectively the sole creator of the Freeman-on-the-Land movement. His ideas are therefore highly relevant and influential.

Would there be anything untoward about posting that article here in its entirety?

[rumpelstilzchen]

"So can I find sufficient people who are willing to take the risk to help make this happen or is it a nation of ninnies who just want to sit on their butt even though they know they are being screwed and will allow it to continue until someone else fixes it for them?"

So Menard is admitting that on his Jack Jones he is a ninny however if he can find a crowd of people to hide behind he will become a tad braver.

[notorial dissent]

Maybe it's just me, but I have a really really hard time believing that Bobby could find a handful, let alone a 1000 suckers members willing to take the chance at jail anymore. I know there are a lot of really really stupid people out there, i.e. the ones who follow and pay attention to Bobby, but they are/have to be a finite set, and I would think that by now that he has screwed most all of them at least once, probably more since they are really really stupid and don't seem to ever learn from past failure experience. I just don't think there can be that many gullible and stupid out there any more.

[arayder]

"So can I find sufficient people who are willing to take the risk to help make this happen or is it a nation of ninnies who just want to sit on their butt even though they know they are being screwed and will allow it to continue until someone else fixes it for them?"

So Menard is admitting that on his Jack Jones he is a ninny however if he can find a crowd of people to hide behind he will become a tad braver.

Bobby's too booze addled to make sense any more.

One of the commenters at his YouTube page suggest he find a sympathetic restaurant owner and run up a few small bills which can be used to test his method. Instead Bobby wants to get enough gullible freemen together to force the restaurant industry to do his bidding. My guess is the industry has many more garden variety dine and dashes then Bobby can ever manage to get organized.

[Bill Lumbergh]

"So can I find sufficient people who are willing to take the risk to help make this happen or is it a nation of ninnies who just want to sit on their butt even though they know they are being screwed and will allow it to continue until someone else fixes it for them?"

So Menard is admitting that on his Jack Jones he is a ninny however if he can find a crowd of people to hide behind he will become a tad braver.

Bobby's too booze addled to make sense any more.

One of the commenters at his YouTube page suggest he find a sympathetic restaurant owner and run up a few small bills which can be used to test his method. Instead Bobby wants to get enough gullible freemen together to force the restaurant industry to do his bidding. My guess is the industry has many more garden variety dine and dashes then Bobby can ever manage to get organized.

And that is actually a poor test of this scheme. Instead of walking out on a $10 burger that's not worth suing or prosecuting over, he should go to the most expensive restaurant in town and run up a sizeable bill. See what happens then.

There doesn't seem to be much uptake with this new appeal, which is probably a good thing. Losing a few bucks on a hairbrained scheme is one thing... ruining your life by ending up with a criminal record is another.

[Chaos]

And that is actually a poor test of this scheme. Instead of walking out on a $10 burger that's not worth suing or prosecuting over, he should go to the most expensive restaurant in town and run up a sizeable bill. See what happens then.

There doesn't seem to be much uptake with this new appeal, which is probably a good thing. Losing a few bucks on a hairbrained scheme is one thing... ruining your life by ending up with a criminal record is another.

that would require shower and something other than tattered clothes to wear.

[LordEd]

That would also involve personal risk. Safer to let others try and then make an excuse to what they did wrong when they fail.

[arayder]

So Menard is admitting that on his Jack Jones he is a ninny however if he can find a crowd of people to hide behind he will become a tad braver.

Bobby's too booze addled to make sense any more.

One of the commenters at his YouTube page suggest he find a sympathetic restaurant owner and run up a few small bills which can be used to test his method. Instead Bobby wants to get enough gullible freemen together to force the restaurant industry to do his bidding. My guess is the industry has many more garden variety dine and dashes then Bobby can ever manage to get organized.

And that is actually a poor test of this scheme. Instead of walking out on a $10 burger that's not worth suing or prosecuting over, he should go to the most expensive restaurant in town and run up a sizeable bill. See what happens then.

There doesn't seem to be much uptake with this new appeal, which is probably a good thing. Losing a few bucks on a hairbrained scheme is one thing... ruining your life by ending up with a criminal record is another.

I think the commenter's idea was that the restaurant would be a willing participant in a test run in which a few freemen would run up small bills and the submission of the bills to the bank or banks would be a test of Bobby's idea. That way the restaurant wouldn't be risking a huge amount of cash and, if things went according to Bobby's plans, there would be a handful of instances in which the banks honored the ACCP notes.

This of course presumes there's a restauranteur dumb enough to buy in to the plan.

That would also involve personal risk. Safer to let others try and then make an excuse to what they did wrong when they fail.

Yeah, Bobby can't afford to have the cops run his name through a data base and find out there's a warrant out on him in Ontario.

[LordEd]

He forgets who is responsible for those hand-written notes.

In the bank loan scenario, the bank hits a few keys and the credits in the person's account increases.

Bank: Cash: $10,000, Depositor accounts: $10,000
---
Loan for $1,000
Bank: Cash: $10,000, Depositor accounts: $11,000. Money owed in loans: $1,000.
Person takes $1,000 loan to buy car
Bank: Cash: $9,000, Depositor accounts: $10,000. Money owed in loans $1,000
-------
Assuming the loan is paid back as $1,100 (loan+interest)
Bank: Cash: $10,100, Depositor accounts: $10,000, Money owed in loans: 0.
Bank now has $100 to pay the janitor.
--------
However, if the person doesn't repay...
Bank: Cash: $9,000, depositor accounts: $10,000.
Now the bank has to earn that extra $1,000 to fill the gap. Sure they can just loan themselves some money and add zeroes to an account, but the real cash amount needs to be replenished.

The key part here is that the bank has people who expect their $11,000 to be convertible to cash on demand. If the bank gets run, its "its a wonderful life" and the bank fails.

This is, of course, simplified.

[rumpelstilzchen]

This is, of course, simplified.

Simple for you, maybe. Too complicated for Rob though.

[arayder]

Read 'em weep, Bobby.

Austin Rayder <*************>
To: ********@restaurantscanada.org,********@restaurantscanada.org, *********@restaurantscanada.org

Dear Restaurants Canada,

I want to take this opportunity to inform you of an effort being made to cheat Canadian restaurants out of meal checks.

An individual by the name of Robert A. Menard is proposing to recruit a thousand "freemen on the land" to run up bills at Canadian resturants and attempt to pay those bills using only their signatures as payment.

Mr. Menard is the leader of the freeman on the land movement in Canada. He and the members of his cult believe they are not subject to the rule of Canadian law.

Mr. Menard has convinced himself and his followers that they can create their own money out of thin air by signing worthless self-make consumer notes. These bogus notes will, according to Mr. Menard's plan, be submitted as payment at Canadian restaurants after freemen have consumed their meals.

You can see Mr. Menard explaining his plan in this YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXpmu2l ... tml5=False

Mr. Menard has already unsuccessfully attempted this illegal ploy at a Cactus Club restaurant in North Burnaby, Vancouver and was warned by local authorities not to attempt such theft again.

Mr. Menard is well aware of the illegality of his consumer notes!

You should also be aware that there is an outstanding warrant out on Mr. Menard for failure to appear in a Toronto court regarding a charge of impersonating a peace officer!

I urge you to alert your member restaurants.

-Austin Rayder