"Common Law Assemblies" forming across Canada, leader endorses sabotaging vaccine supplies
Sovereign Citizens associated with the Republic of Kanata are getting organized and advocating reckless and illegal activities
Hello new readers! Neet Newz’ past series of articles on anti-government currents in the anti-lockdown movement may give more context to this story.
The other week I was tipped off to news that the Oceanside RCMP broke up a gathering of 150 people at a hall in Coombs, who appeared to be pseudolaw proponents. Although the group gathering was not named in any media or police reports, Nanaimo News Now reported that the group was “a newly formed assembly who believe they are no longer under the jurisdiction of Canadian law and are not bound to abide by it, including public health orders installed during the pandemic.” The owners who rented the space to them were not pleased that they did not abide by the health requirements as promised.
Although I could not confirm this, my first suspicion was that this was the alleged “Oceanside Common Law Assembly,” which had public declarations attributed to it stating that measures to contain COVID-19 were illegal and threatened that those enforcing them could be arrested and tried as part of a criminal conspiracy against Canadians. In my previous article on the role of organized pseudolegal commercial arguments in the anti-lockdown movement I had been skeptical if not dismissive of the Oceanside Common Law Assembly’s existence, as the primary source for it was the notorious fraud and hoaxster Kevin Annett, founder and effective leader of the Republic of Kanata.
After taking a closer examination, I can now confirm that multiple “Common Law Assemblies” associated with Kevin Annett and his Republic of Kanata have formed over the past two months and are active. The exact status of some are unclear or ambiguous, as some have allegedly gone through internal disputes due to association with Annett and the confrontational approach he advocates for. Perhaps some like the Oceanside Common Law Assembly continue to exist without being associated with him. Regardless, it appears Sovereign Citizens are better organized in Canada than we would initially think, and this is happening at a quick rate.
A republic of Zoom chats
Since September, Kevin Annett has made weekly appearances in a Zoom chat organized by Dena Churchill, a former chiropractor from Halifax who had her license to practice revoked in 2018 for promoting anti-vaccine misinformation. These Zoom meetings were done on behalf of the Atlantic Common Law Assembly which she is part of, but others are allowed to attend. Recordings of the Zoom chats are uploaded to Dena Churchill’s YouTube account. In these videos, I have seen figures claiming to be from the Greater Edmonton Common Law Assembly and an apparent Vancouver Common Law Assembly. On his podcasts, we can also hear representatives of the Greater Victoria Common Law Assembly. In some cases they are recognizable figures of confirmed location, so these assemblies clearly exist in at least some capacity.
Atlantic Common Law Assembly is the most publicly visible of these assemblies, as Dena Churchill has included other people in other videos on her YouTube channel. Dena Churchill has organized anti-lockdown / anti-mask rallies in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, including the one Ontario anti-masker Chris Saccoccia tried to attend before he was stopped at the airport. According to Dena Churchill, the Atlantic Common Law Assembly started on September 18th with 28 people and “eight people by proxy,” and covers people in the Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. In other videos, Churchill shows that anti-vaccine activist Andrew Mader is a sheriff for the Atlantic Common Law Assembly, and other people are also shown. They also have a website.
The Greater Victoria Common Law Assembly can also be confirmed to exist in at least a small capacity. In podcasts the representative Fiona Yaki is known to me to be the organizer of March to Unmask Victoria, which did a couple protests in the summer. March to Unmask was a project of B.C. anti-lockdown protest organizer Ryan Kulbaba, who tried to coordinate multiple anti-mask rallies across the country beginning July 19th. His project was thrown off track shortly after the first nationwide rallies by disputes with other organizers in his A Celebration of Freedoms and Rights group, but some local organizers continued under the March to Unmask moniker or continued to use their Facebook pages to promote other events and misinformation. While the Facebook page for March to Unmask Victoria ceased activity in mid-September, it did upload videos between that time featuring Annett and had one that was labeled as a meeting for the Greater Victoria Common Law Assembly. The Greater Victoria Common Law Assembly also has set up website.
There is also a Greater Edmonton Common Law Assembly chaired by Carla Wilchuck. It also has a website which shows events it has organized over the past two months. In Dena Churchill’s Zoom chats we can also hear people from Ontario who are interested and trying to form their own Common Law Assemblies.
Annett sees these Common Law Assemblies as building blocks for his Republic. Advice he gives is for people to form a cell of two or three people. They can unite after they have found a dozen or so people to form an assembly. The Common Law Assemblies appear to have somewhat of a security culture and do not put every little thing they do online unlike many anti-lockdown and patriot activists. They also require giving personal information to sign up. Annett has also discouraged protests, saying they won’t accomplish much (protests are used to make demands from the state, but he opposes the Crown) and facial recognition technology will be used to identify enemies of the state. He also discourages individual action which makes people easy targets for arrests, using his Sovereign Citizen “friend” Dean Clifford as an example. Nonetheless, Annett bizarrely encourages his followers to try to win over police officers with their common law rhetoric and tells his audience unlikely tales about police recognizing their declarations denouncing COVID-19 restrictions.
Annett has claimed even more Common Law Assemblies existed, this may be possible but it is not proven. As I will show, Annett is not a reliable source of testimony and should not be taken at his word. Annett has also claimed that several of these recently formed Common Law Assemblies were dismantled after what he calls a “black ops campaign” he attributes to plainclothes RCMP officers (an accusation he has made for decades towards anyone who criticizes or questions him), causing eight assemblies in British Columbia and two in Alberta to effectively disband. He accused fellow pesudolaw proponents of being RCMP agents partaking in a campaign against him, including the New Constitutionalist group Unify the People and Sovereign Citizen advocate Christopher James Pritchard (also known under the name of his website and online show “A Warrior Calls”). The alleged Parskville Common Law Assembly was supposedly one of these that ran into trouble with Annett, which may give hints as to what happned to the Oceanside Common Law Assembly’s status as in public statements they seemed closely related, but I can only speculate.
Encouraging dangerous activities
Annett’s approach and behaviour as well as his own past history is likely what causes much of this infighting. By his own account, the point of tension in these Common Law Assemblies always surround his role and their association with the Republic of Kanata. According to him, these supposed agents of division pose as proponents of common law, but then start badjacketing him and telling people not to trust or associate with him and the Republic of Kanata. They also disagree with his “confrontational” approach, saying they should just stick to educating people about their (mis)understanding of common law. Annett argues that the approach his critics advocate is preferred by the state since it renders them ineffective and powerless.
There may be many reasons people even within pseudolaw, anti-vaccine and conspiracy theorist circles may object to Kevin Annett that he sweeps aside however. In his videos and podcasts, we can see Annett advocate a number of illegal activities on behalf of these assemblies. In addition to making calls to arrest people who try to enforce mask-wearing, Annett also suggests trying to seize public buildings and property to claim them for the Common Law Assemblies and the Republic of Kanata. He is especially interested in seizing the courts, which he imagines they can hold their Common Law Assemblies in. He also considers Catholic and United Church of Canada as Crown property, so has also mentioned his desire to reclaim them. In another video from September 23rd he endorsed efforts to “directly dismantle” 5G towers. Most worryingly of all is in another video from November 18th, in which Annett promotes an early plot to sabotage Canada’s vaccine supplies and equipment:
"We're having a sherriff meeting tonight in Vancouver. We're talking concretely about how we're going to stop these measures. For example one thing we're finding out is where these vaccines are being shipped from and to, where they are being stored. Okay? Like the sheriffs in Vancouver are talking openly about going in and trashing these vaccines. We are not going to let these vaccinations be distributed. We’re going to stop it, physically, from happening."
Calling for kidnapping citizens as phony arrests, seizing public property, sabotaging telecommunications infrastructure and destroying our healthcare supply. Good thing he didn’t try to stop an energy pipeline, or Canada’s security agencies would be on red alert.
History of deceitful exploitation of Indigenous history
COVID-19 is not the first deadly disease Annett has used to spread conspiracy theorist scares about vaccines. During the H1N1 pandemic, Annett made false claims that vaccinations were being designed to commit genocide against Indigenous peoples. Then, like today, he said that the usage of these deadly vaccines on white people would constitute the expansion of a continuous genocide towards Indigenous peoples being expanded to include white people. This took better founded fears of medical colonialism, which persisted then (the initial assistance Health Canada gave to Manitoba reserves was to send body bags) as it does today, and turned them into an absurdity. Martial law did not happen, Canada did not become a dictatorship, and the vaccines did not make things worse, all of which he predicted.
Exploiting the real and tragic history of Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples to push his own outlandish fantasies is a recurring theme from Annett’s work. The best known of these is when he had a sham court find Pope Benedict XVI guilty of genocide. When Benedict XVI resigned Annett declared that his “ruling” caused him to resign in fear, a claim he repeats to his followers today to impress them of the strength of common law and his declarations.
Another scam of his which has not received as much attention online is his claim that he had discovered proof of unmarked mass graves of Indigenous childrens murdered at a residential school in Brantford. Annett dug up an animal bone, immediately published statements falsely declaring that he had the remains of a child against the wishes of other investigators who were working with him in good faith and the Six Nations Elected Council. He then went round showing these bones off, including to an Occupy Toronto demonstration. An APTN investigation put his findings into doubt.
Annett wants people to believe that his own “discoveries” are what led to the government launching the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (which he considers a whitewash for not repeating his claims) and Trudeau’s acknowledgement of genocide in response to the Inquiry on MMIWG2S, which he bizarrely believes vindicates his own claims.
A white man taking Canada’s real and attocious history and understandable fears and using it to spread wild fantasies for his own self-promotion (which apparently has included fundraising) is quite despicable. Indigenous activists seeking justice for residential school survivors have opposed Annet’s shameless exploitation of these issues for over two decades. While some of Annett’s actions might seem like he’s trying to support Indigenous people, he says many things about Indigenous people that would put the average anti-Indigenous haters to shame, including accusing leaders on reserves of being bribed and partaking in drug dealing and child trafficking. Much of Annett’s focus can also seem abstract and detached from realities on the ground, in several hours worth of material I have listened to him from recent months he does not mention important Indigenous struggles like Wet’suwet’en, Mi’kmaq, Six Nations, and others that are going on at present, some of which (like the Mi’kmaq fishing standoff) are obviously more complicated than just the fault of governing elites.
Syncretic militancy
With his talk of economic democracy, focus on Canada’s genocide and denuniciation of the "corporatocracy," Annet can seem more like he would be someone from the left. It's not unusual for him to drop terms like “direct action,” "post-colonial" or "liberation theology" in video discussions and podcasts, one episode even closes off with the Italian anti-fascist anthem Bella Ciao. At the same time, he has been on Infowars and is friendly with the US militia movmenet, and calls Sovereign Citizens of a more far-right bent like Dean Clifford his friend. In more recent material, he pushes a xenophobic China scare, accusing Justin Trudeau of selling out the West coast and pushing discredited claims that the Chinese military has been seen training in BC. He singles out a “foreign” Chinese national owning a business and is outraged they would dare to enforce a masking requirement on Canadians. Annett has also repeatedly dismissed transgender issues as a ridiculous scheme used by the elite to divide people.
Annett’s following may be small, but it is growing, and it seems to be able to draw from a more different crowd than the patriot groups we are used to, namely anti-vaccine activists. As both the Canadian far-right and anti-lockdown movements adapt to a post-Trump future, guys like Annett who dismissed the US election as a sham with no difference between the candidates may be a preview of what’s coming, especially as we move towards vaccinations which will be actively resisted. His new fan club shows similarities to a cult centered around his supposed genius and generosity. He cites his multiple self-published works like scriptures, which give the solutions to save the world, and only evil RCMP agents would dare say anything bad about him. Even if Annett’s cult of personality is not able to hold sway over his followers (and he has already lost a few), the ability to attract a differing range of people, and the advocacy of militant actions in the name of a conspiracy theorist movement all remain a cause for concern.
Although it appears to be written by a conspiracy theorist critic of his and is no longer updated, the blog “Kevin Annett Must be Stopped” has been useful to me in writing some of this.