(May 21 2020)
Today I thought an addendum to yesterday’s blog on false receipts would be appropriate.
When I first started researching the federal securities law called the Canada Interest Act in 1990, I was soon drawn to the Hansard records of Parliamentary procedure and debate.
It took me a little while to clue in to what was really going on because it was such an unexpected aberration. Like most people I had always associated legal loopholes with clever lawyers who would discover them on behalf of clients. But it soon became obvious to me that the loopholes were being deliberately planted by the MP’s who wrote the laws, in the form of needlessly complicated language so as to give the judges the tools they needed to thwart the intent of any law that ultimately interfered with the interests of the entrenched-money-power.
I will do a much more comprehensive blog on this subject in the future, but here is an excerpt from “Money-Lending my butt” that covers the procedure used on the Criminal Code offence under False Receipts:
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(As covered in Rule of Law my butt, Part 1) Prior to January of 1981 and the amendment of the Criminal Code to provide for a criminal rate of interest conversion (and which screwed everything up for them (the entrenched-money-power in Canada)), the most obvious legislative firewall was under s. 388 of the Criminal Code (false receipts).
The general phenomenon of false receipts is apparently dealt with under the Criminal Code, as one might expect given the obvious potential for related criminal activity:
388. Every one who wilfully
(a) with intent to mislead, injure or defraud any person, whether or not that person is known to him, gives to a person anything in writing that purports to be a receipt for or an acknowledgment of property [e.g., money, loan proceeds] that has been delivered to or received by him, before the property referred to in the purported receipt or acknowledgment has been delivered to or received by him, or
(b) accepts, transmits or uses a purported receipt or acknowledgment to which paragraph (a) applies,
is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.
Did you catch the defect or manufactured-loophole?
It is effectively a criminal law against a form of counterfeit money, but which only applies if the party (constructively or in effect) receiving the counterfeit is aware that it is counterfeit. Otherwise the party (constructively or in effect) passing it does not commit an offence under the section.
Even though the bankers solicit and obtain the financial benefit of the falsified receipt(s), it is only an offence under this section of the criminal law if the nominal borrower is specifically aware that it is a false receipt and intends thereby to dishonestly obtain something by deceiving the other party (which is legally impossible if the other party (banker) wants to be deceived).
With a conventional counterfeit currency-note, the fraud is against the receiver of the counterfeit and committed by the giver / passer of the counterfeit. But a cash-payment-receipt in a financial transaction effectively reverses the polarity, such that the fraud is committed by the solicitor / receiver of the counterfeit (falsified receipt) and not the issuer / passer of it who is in fact the victim of it.
So any judge whose attention is brought to the section will pick up on the defect (via cognitive dissonance or otherwise) and know that he or she is not to go there at all.
The English Parliament, to which Canada’s is a legal and actual extension, has been writing laws for 400-plus years, with the various Parliamentary Committees allegedly agonizing for up to six-months on the meaning and import of every word in a proposed statute before it is enacted into law.
It is near inconceivable that that defect was other than deliberate.
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The entrenched-money-power has been at this for centuries, and it is all more or less cumulative. There is just one fire-wall after another to protect them from being held accountable to the systematic looting of the masses.
The problem with such a thing is that it always works – until it doesn’t.
(Note also that false receipts are offensive to at least half a dozen different sections under the Criminal Code such that the defect in s. 388 does not save the practice from a criminal conviction – but it does signal the judges that they are not to go there at all.)