Dr Donald J Netolitzky KC

@bethanylindsay of the CBC has published a very nice piece describing a "money for nothing" lawsuit that was rejected by the British Columbia Supreme Court: cbc.ca/news/canada/british-c… The scheme used was "A4V" or "Accept for Value". The hearing judge had this to say about the Zimmers' litigation: It is nothing but incoherent, unintelligible nonsense devoid of any viable claim or cause of action known to the law. It is supported by equally incoherent and unintelligible affidavits. It is, by any measure, frivolous and vexatious to the extent that it can be struck without further analysis. I'm only briefly going to discuss A4V scheme, because the CBC article does a fine job, and, if you want more, the linked Meads v Meads, 2012 ABQB 571 decision is as good a summary of the scheme that I can point to. A4V claims that you have a secret bank account that was opened by the government to use you as collateral - you're a slave - and the bank account number is your birth certificate or social insurance number. With magic paperwork, you can seize that "Birth Bond" and you'll have a dumpload of cash. No, it does't work, and new variations appear regularly. Watching people try to use A4V is kind of analogous to someone with a ring of keys, jabbing those keys one after another into a crack in a wall, presuming that is some kind of lock. But I'd like to discuss A4V in a broader historical sense. Like so much modern Canadian #pseudolaw, A4V has its origins in the US. I still see A4V packages that claim people in Canada have secret US Birth Bond accounts. But what makes A4V significant is that the invention of A4V did more than just promise money for nothing. A4V knitted together modern pseudolaw, as a separate legal system. Modern A4V was invented in the late 1990s by a US farmer named Roger Elvick, who called the process "Redemption". Up to this point there had been a collection of pseudolaw ideas circulating in the US in various communities for many decades. Maybe into the 1800s. These involve ideas like there are multiple legal systems, name structures have significance, "invisible contracts" create state authority, monetary conspiracy theories. Many more. What Elvick did is he assembled these ideas and beliefs into the broader A4V narrative. So A4V isn't just pseudolaw, it's second order pseudolaw, built off earlier, developed, and broadly accepted in atypical belief circles. Elvick explained why there are these mysterious secret bank accounts by pointing to earlier concepts. Then, he used pre-A4V pseudolaw - the principle silence means agreement - to create documents Elvick said would bind others, unlocking the money. And, naturally, the US pseudolaw community just loved this, and thoroughly embraced Elvick's narrative. Didn't work - but oh how they have been trying, for decades. US pseudolaw didn't make a lot of impact in Canada prior to Elvick inventing A4V. Oh, US gurus did appear up here occasionally, but there was a growing Canada-specific pseudolaw legal system. But when A4V crystallized the "mature" US pseudolaw system, that proved extremely seductive. The bigger narrative, with its layers of rules and rich backstory, was adapted for Canada by a leader of the Detaxer Movement, Eldon Warman. That marked a total shift in Canadian pseudolaw. The US system displaced how-grown pseudolaw, that went basically extinct. The same has happened in numerous other countries. A4V produced the broader conspiracy and empowerment narrative that made pseudolaw so tempting and successful, to the point that now there is really only one, surprisingly uniform and cohesive pseudolaw system, worldwide.