Be alert when you hear “sovereign citizen”, it’s a very specific term that both the RCMP and FBI used to identify those who wish to operate outside the mechanisms of the state.
To them, it refers to those who believe “courts have no jurisdiction over people, that the use of certain procedures (such as writing specific phrases on bills they do not want to pay) or loopholes can make one immune to government laws and regulations.” They create their own identification cards, their own States or nation states, they refuse to file taxes and generally don’t feel they are bound to any laws.
As with most things, there is a nugget of truth in the idea, at least in Canada.
In my opinion, agents of the state use this term purposefully in order to conflate “Sovereign citizens” with “Popular Sovereignty”, the idea that “the leaders of a state and its government are created and sustained by the consent of its people, who are the source of all political legitimacy”, in other words, the basis for all political power in the United States. It’s otherwise known as the “consent of the governed”, the same referred to in the Declaration of Independence.
Obviously that isn’t the case in Canada, never has been the case, and never will be the case under such a system as “constitutional monarchy”.
From the start Canada has been an imposition, it has operated as an inversion of the concept of popular sovereignty where “the people” are subjects, not involved in drafting, ratifying or implementing the constitution, where the laws are imposed by a caste of operators with a very specific set of political ideas (adherence to the “the crown” which they have now ruled is synonymous with the Canadian state, even though all the links that previously conveyed royal prerogative still exist), where the legitimization of villeinage and socage as “citizenship” appears to be the priority.
The arbitrary and ad hoc nature of “Canadian ‘democracy'” is best understood through those earlier feudal implementations, not through the American meaning and understanding of “democracy” or a republic, since we are still in a very real sense held as chattel under an 18th century British Whig interpretation of “representation”. It is the crown that is represented, not the people, the perfection of democracy is to be found in the total insulation of the people from political power, not in their participation.
So, in terms of the mechanics of the state, those “sovereign citizens” are on to something, in that Canada operates as if it were a proprietary colony, not as a “democracy” or nation state as we have all been told exists, in order to completely delegitimize the individual in terms of political power.
I don’t say this to suggest anyone refuses to file taxes, though tax protest movements are a legitimate way to thumb your nose at the legitimacy of the state. I don’t suggest anyone should believe those who say the courts have no jurisdiction, since you will find out in short order their sovereignty is absolute.
What I am saying is that there’s a purposeful sleight of hand used to confuse these two terms and the underlying concepts are key to understanding the road to serfdom, which no other nation on Earth might encapsulate better than “Canada”. The breadcrumb trail is there once you start pulling back the clumsy carpentry that’s been holding it together since 1867.