Flagrantly Freeboarding

If tax officials are "ignored or thwarted, the taxation regime is seriously compromised and that affects every Canadian, as we are dependent on tax revenue to fund most of our social and other programs, and indeed our government as a whole."
"In my view, ensuring compliance with orders made by the court pursuant to the Income Tax Act is critical because most everyone in Canada pays tax and reporting is largely self-reporting."
Federal Court Justice Russel Zinn

Fined $5,000, ordered to pay legal fees that the government racked up in the order of $20,000 to mount a legal case against yet another Canadian scofflaw who wishfully imagines that everyone else in the country can go  right ahead and pay their rightful due to ensure that there is civil infrastructure, courts, a health system, educational structure, policing agencies, a standing military, but he alone should be excused from the burden, yet lap up his share of tax-paid government services.

Tel Sutherland, 41, of Grande Prairie, Alberta, declined the offer by Canadian courts to right the stupidity that he attempted to foist upon the other taxpayers of the country, and went to prison instead. He was imprisoned for not co-operating with a tax audit. One of a growing number of schemers living as citizens of Canada, but self-opting out of universal taxation that pay for our universal social and structural benefits, existing, in a "conspiratorial and demon-haunted shadow world."

"I made quite the tour. I toured all of the facilities in Alberta, a least three of the hotspots", he said cheerily enough in an interview after having served over two months behind bars. It was a waiting game, between him and the court that bided its time for him to "purge his contempt" of courts of law and of Canadian taxation laws. "Pretty much everywhere I went, they looked at me and said, 'You're in here for that? Really?" 

Well, yes, really, really really.

In 2011, Canada Revenue Agency undertook to initiate an audit of The Money Stop Ltd., a chain of payday lender and cheque-cashing stores that were owned by Mr. Sutherland. He chose to refuse the requested handover of financial records. A Federal Court judge thereafter ordered him to comply. Ever so cleverly he handed over five boxes of documents. When CRA agents attempted to open his electronic bookkeeping files they discovered them to be password protected and the passwords denied them.

Two months of incarceration appears to have somewhat tempered Mr. Sutherland of his firm belief in the inviolability of his earnings from government reach. He turned over the password and all the documents that the CRA required. And he was ordered released from imprisonment. Mr. Sutherland's clever little scheme was to draft a document as a legal text assigning government as trustee over a bank account which in his mind was created by the government, the tax agency, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations.

Everyone, in Mr. Sutherland's fanciful thought processes, has such an account, created at birth with the issuance of a birth certificate, presumably. The social insurance number or birth certificate number allocated to each individual represents their bank account number. And Mr. Sutherland's document purported to instruct the government to use his personal account that existed in his head to withdraw taxes and settle lawsuits, fines, liens and debt that might be assigned to him.

It's a scheme that goes one better than plucking dollars off trees.  It's hard to choose which is grubbier, his business enterprise or his taxation-cheat attempt.

Dream on. In glowing technicolour, if preferred.