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Disorder in the court

Inside a movement of COVID deniers and conspiracists — including one Ontario cop — who are clogging the courts with ‘legal gibberish’

STEVE BUIST INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER

As an OPP constable, Gabriel Proulx has sworn to uphold the laws of the province and the country.

But now facing charges of discreditable conduct for his actions in defying COVID protocols, the Belleville-based police officer is arguing some of those laws don’t apply to him.

Proulx is fighting the Police Services Act charges laid against him by employing a debunked, courtclogging and often self-destructive legal strategy that’s rising in popularity alongside a growing wave of COVID disinformation and antigovernment rage.

It’s called Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments, or “legal gibberish,” as some judges describe it.

OPCA litigants generally believe that laws don’t apply to them, or, sometimes in tandem, they claim to operate their own vigilante legal system that takes precedence over the traditional court system.

The term was coined in 2012 by Alberta judge John Rooke in an exasperating divorce case where the husband was trying to argue that he was really two separate entities — the “corporate” identity that was attached to his birth certificate and the “flesh-and-blood man” who was governed only by God’s law, the “Maximus of Law.”

The term and Rooke’s point-bypoint repudiation of OPCA tactics has since been adopted by courts as the gold standard in Canada and in other Commonwealth countries.

He described Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments as a strategy used by certain groups — Detaxers, Freemen on the Land, Sovereign Citizens, for example — to deny state and court authority.

“They will only honour state, regulatory, contract, family, fiduciary, equitable, and criminal obligations if they feel like it,” Rooke wrote in his decision. “And typically, they don’t.”

There are usually telltale signs warning a judge that an OPCA litigant is about to snarl the proceedings.

There’s an avalanche of document filings that contain odd punctuation and uncapitalized letters, such as the phrase “i:man” to start sentences. There’s a distinctive naming convention of describing themselves by first and middle name as part of the such-and-such family — “Gabriel Gilles of the Proulx family,” for example.

There’s the use of what appears to be a red thumbprint as a signature, incomprehensible jargon meant to sound legal, and the issuance of bogus “trespass” notices against official figures often with exorbitant financial demands.

“Most OPCA concepts are contemptibly stupid,” Rooke’s decision said, “never sold to their customers as simple ideas, but instead are Byzantine schemes which more closely resemble the plot of a dark fantasy novel than anything else.”

Organized pseudolegal adherents are usually self-represented in court but sometimes they’re assisted by nonlawyers who give themselves titles such as “counsellor at law.” The most prominent of the country’s pseudolegal gurus is based in Burlington.

Some judges give them a different name — “snake oil salesmen,” according to one Alberta court decision, who peddle their outlandish legal concepts to like-minded people “in a kind of echo chamber.”

In several cases, judges have tried to warn pseudolegal litigants about their self-destructive behaviour to no avail. In some cases, they’ve even been declared vexatious litigants, meaning they are barred from initiating legal proceedings without first obtaining the court’s permission.

Ottawa lawyer Richard Warman, a human rights and hate group specialist, has been monitoring the organized pseudolegal movement for more than 20 years.

“This would certainly be one of the upswings of the waves right now,” said Warman.

He’s not surprised to see an overlap between an increase in OPCA litigants and the rise of anti-science beliefs during the pandemic.

“COVID unfortunately opened up a new pool of (followers),” he said.

As Warman and several judges have pointed out, OPCA tactics typically leave litigants facing worse judgments, stronger penalties and higher costs.

On April 17, 2021, Proulx and a group of parents brought their children to a park in Belleville.

It was a Saturday — the first day of a controversial and short-lived directive by

Doug Ford’s government ordering outdoor playgrounds to close as a third wave of COVID infections took hold.

As city workers tried to enforce the regulation, Proulx and some other parents became confrontational and refused to remove their children from the play area, according to news reports and the OPP’s misconduct charge notice to Proulx.

Belleville city police arrived at the park and another confrontation took place. According to the OPP’s allegations, Proulx and some of the other parents attempted to intimidate the city police officers and made threatening comments “that arresting them was ‘not an option’ and ‘would not go as planned.’ ”

In September, Proulx sent the OPP a “Trespass” notice intended to read as a list of “charges,” a common tactic used by OPCA litigants.

In the rambling six-page document addressed to several of the OPP’s top brass, Proulx rhymed off a number of COVID conspiracies.

COVID-19 has never been purified or isolated in a lab, Proulx said, while vaccines and lockouts are a “genocide.”

“Nuremberg trials are coming given ‘Graphene Oxide,’ a verified poison, exists in these ‘vaccinations,’ ” Proulx stated.

Proulx’s actions in September led to a new complaint launched by the OPP alleging he had sent unsolicited emails to high-ranking OPP officials. The complaint also states Proulx is being investigated for online social media interviews where he allegedly made “disparaging comments towards members of the Canadian government and further denounced the laws of Canada by referencing that the Canadian laws do not apply” to him.

“Your continued and ongoing off duty behaviour has brought the reputation of the OPP into disrepute,” according to the OPP’s complaint letter.

Proulx is now facing two counts of discreditable conduct. A hearing date has not yet been set.

Proulx is fighting his charges with the help of Christopher James Pritchard of Burlington, described by an Alberta judge as one of the leading Canadian “gurus” of the OPCA movement.

Proulx and Pritchard did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Last June, a B.C. court permanently banned Pritchard, who is not a lawyer, from acting as a lawyer in B.C. following an application made by the province’s law society.

The Law Society of Ontario indicated Pritchard is not a registered lawyer or paralegal in Ontario and declined to say if he is under investigation.

Go to Pritchard’s website and one finds a library of videos, including one with a title littered with antiSemitic tropes and another titled “Vaccines are Satan’s Death.”

A whole section of the site is devoted to Louis Farrakhan, the controversial leader of the Nation of

Islam described as anti-Semitic and homophobic. In 2019, Facebook banned Farrakhan for violating its policies on hateful speech.

Pritchard’s website hosts a wild mix of pseudolaw postings and lengthy video commentaries. There’s a short video featuring Holocaust denier David Irving.

Other videos feature interviews with Proulx. In one, he talks about growing up in a small town in northern Quebec, his short career as a defenceman in the minor leagues of professional hockey, and a stint in the military.

He states in one video that he was on stress leave at the time of the incident in the park and that he went on “medical leave” at the beginning of November.

There’s also extensive documentation on Pritchard’s site from cases he’s involved with, including Proulx’s.

He says there are documents that contain powerful evidence to help Proulx’s case and includes claims the COVID vaccine contains nanosized particles that act as razor blades to rip apart blood vessels and that “SIM cardlike” fragments in the vaccine could be carrying information that gets implanted in the protein manufacturing apparatus of cells.

Pritchard’s track record when helping OPCA litigants appears woeful.

There’s the case of the Manary family, tobacco and vegetable farmers in Norfolk County.

They turned to Pritchard for assistance over a loan dispute involving their properties. While it’s not clear precisely how much assistance Pritchard provided in this case, he has posted dozens of documents to his site related to the family’s dispute.

Court documents show the Manary family owes close to $3 million in judgments and costs to Farm Credit Canada (FCC), a Crown corporation that provides agricultural loans.

Judges have also turned over possession of three Manary properties to FCC over unpaid loans after the Manary family’s unsuccessful court efforts.

At some of last year’s court hearings, the Manarys were accompanied by Grand Chief Wabiska Mukwa — also known as Zane Bell — who claims to be the chief justice of something called the Anishinabek Solutrean Métis Indigenous Nation (ASMIN).

ASMIN is not a recognized First Nation in Canada and as Superior Court Justice Paul Sweeny noted in a court ruling, “for the price of $225, anyone can become a member of the ASMIN Nation” by filling out an application.

One member of the Manary family claimed to be a “tribesman” of ASMIN and that FCC’s mortgage on the family property was invalid because the land was unceded territory.

“This assertion is nonsense,” the judge stated.

In a response by email, Mukwa said the ASMIN application fee is $50, not $225.

“The judge had an old website,” Mukwa said. “There is then a process to go through.”

There’s the case of Mississauga’s Michael Sekulovski, who turned to Pritchard while he was in the midst of a bitter court fight over the estate of Sekulovski’s father.

With Pritchard’s help, Sekulovski unsuccessfully attempted in 2020 to sue two Superior Court justices, the lawyer appointed to deal with the estate, and a handful of other lawyers.

They intended for the case against the court officials to be heard in the “Sekulovski Court” which happened to be located in the same building as the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Steeles Ave. in Milton.

The “Trespass” claim in this case concludes with what appear to be red thumbprint seals by Sekulovski and Pritchard in place of signatures.

The case was quickly dismissed by Justice Kendra Coats, who described the claim as “frivolous, vexatious and an abuse of the process of the court,” and then ordered Sekulovski to pay nearly $10,000 in costs.

Sekulovski and Pritchard doubled down and filed new “Trespass” notices in the “Sekulovski Court” — these ones against Coats, then Gov. General Julie Payette, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Richard Wagner, among others. That claim collapsed even faster than the previous one.

“No matter what they may have been told by others or learned online, claims in the format that they have submitted do not amount to a legal proceeding,” stated Justice Fred Myers.

“This type of gibberish is abusive on its face.”

Sekulovski and Brent Manary, a representative of the Manary family, did not respond to several requests for comment.

In another case, Mak Parhar of New Westminster, B.C., engaged Pritchard as his “counsellor at law” after being charged with violating the Quarantine Act when he returned from Flatoberfest, a flat Earth festival in the U.S. in October 2020.

Parhar was a prominent COVID denier and antimasker.

A year later, Parhar died, shortly after exhibiting serious symptoms — which he denied was COVID. He said the disease didn’t exist.

The day before he died, he told his followers in a rambling video that he had taken the veterinary drug ivermectin, unproven as a treatment for COVID.

It was Pritchard’s involvement in Parhar’s case that led the Law Society of B.C. to seek the court injunction against his misrepresentation as a lawyer.

Warman, the Ottawa lawyer, said pseudolegal litigants are often driven by desperation.

“They become susceptible to people who tell them that if only they buy this snake oil, their problem will be solved,” Warman said.

“They take what may be a bad situation and they turn it into an awful situation,” he said, “where their families are destroyed, where they end up losing their homes, where their interpersonal relationships are destroyed.”

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2022-05-22T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-22T07:00:00.0000000Z

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