The freeman-on-the-land theory

That government and the courts operate a concealed system of commercial law in which the state, at registration of a birth, creates a separate legal fiction — the 'strawman', identified with the name in capital letters on the birth certificate — and that all taxation, prosecution and enforcement run against that fiction rather than the living person; and that by filing the correct notices, refusing to 'contract', and asserting the right words in court, an individual can sever the connection and be governed only by their own reading of common law.

The core ideas came out of the American sovereign citizen movement of the 1970s and 1980s, itself grown from the Posse Comitatus and the tax-protester milieu of the farm crisis. They entered Canada around 2000 through the 'Detaxer' movement and were reworked into the freeman-on-the-land package by a small number of teachers — 'gurus', in the term Canadian courts adopted — who sold seminars, document templates and DVDs. From roughly 2008 the material spread through the English-speaking internet to the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, arriving in Britain in a form loud enough to fund roadside billboards reading 'legal name fraud'.

The movement peaked in Canada around 2010 and has declined since, but the ideas have proved portable. Pseudolegal notices reappeared in force during the COVID-19 pandemic, served on police officers, employers and school principals over masks and vaccination. The 'paper terrorism' tactic — filing liens and spurious claims against officials — has consumed real court time in several countries. J. M. Berger's study for George Washington University's extremism programme documents the American branch's overlap with violent anti-government activity; the Commonwealth variants have been far less violent and far more expensive to their own believers.