It could be the largest defamation award ever in Canada and the case has ties to the ‘pseudo-law’ movement
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An Alberta oil baron’s two heiresses have been ordered to pay $6.6 million in damages for libeling a Calgary lawyer and law firm, in what could be the largest defamation award ever in Canada.
The judgement came after the lawyers filed a libel suit against Sandra and sister Susan Anderson over a website that falsely accused several lawyers and judges of embezzlement.
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But the case may have as much to do with Sandra Anderson’s bizarre “pseudo-law” beliefs, which assert that the Canadian legal system is invalid and have put her in repeated conflict with Alberta courts.
Another judge described Anderson in 2022 as a “litigation terrorist” and a “greedy, uncooperative, abusive scofflaw” after she claimed she had no obligation to make mortgage payments on her condominium. The judge handed the condo over to her bank. Anderson has also invoked strange “sovereign-citizen” ideas to try to avoid paying fines for smuggling high-priced horses from the U.S., and evade criminal charges that included impaired driving, fraud and transporting fireworks on an airplane.
The Andersons’ lawyer could not be reached for comment by deadline. But in court documents the sisters ask that the judgment be set aside, refuting the defamation allegations and calling the damages “grossly excessive.”
Jonathan Denis, the lawyer handling the libel action disagreed, saying the seven-figure award was fair in light of the numerous judgments against Sandra Anderson for flooding the courts with made-up legal gambits – many in violation of previous judicial orders.
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“The court is simply trying to put a stop to this,” said the lawyer, a former Alberta justice minister. “There is a legitimate public policy objective here, which is that nobody is above the law.”
Even so, Denis actually offered to drop the case at one point if the libelous statements were removed from the website.
When the Andersons failed to file any response to the lawsuit in court – or remove the statements – the plaintiffs applied for and were granted what’s called a “default” judgment. Those are issued when the defendant in a civil suit makes no attempt to defend against the legal action.
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At a hearing last September, Court of King’s Bench Justice Paul Jeffrey surprised even the lawyers behind the lawsuit by imposing $6 million in punitive damages, on top of $600,000 of “general” damages – all of which were more than the plaintiffs themselves had requested.
The judge cited Sandra Anderson’s history with the court, said the libel could have hurt the lawyers’ ability to earn a living and noted that the web page was kept online long after the lawsuit was filed. It’s still there today.
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“The failure to remedy the defamation and leaving it posted, day by day, factored significantly into my assessment of the outrageous behaviour,” Jeffrey said.
The court has since frozen the $44-million estate of the sisters’ father, the late oil-industry billionaire J.C. Anderson, as the lawyers – Clint Docken and the Guardian Law Group – seek to make good on the award. A third sibling and beneficiary of the estate is not part of the case.
“This group of lawbreakers are causing no end of grief in people’s lives and completely disrupting our legal systems,” Docken, a prominent class-action lawyer, said in a statement to National Post.
But the case is not over yet. Sandra Anderson and her sister have retained a lawyer and filed applications asking the court to set aside the default judgment.
The sisters did not “deliberately” fail to file a statement of defence and anyway have an “arguable defence” to the allegation they committed libel, says their application.
In statements of defence attached to the applications, the Andersons deny the allegations and say even if they had defamed the lawyers and caused them damage, the $6.6-million award was “grossly excessive.”
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Ottawa-based lawyer Richard Warman is a longtime critic of the pseudo-law phenomenon. But he said fairness dictates that the court determine if the sisters were fully aware of the stakes in the case when they failed to respond in court.
The original statement of claim asked for just $175,000 in damages, he noted. The lawyers requested more compensation when they appeared in court and the judge awarded an even larger sum.
“That’s an order-of-magnitude difference,” Warman said. “You would want to make sure that the defendants were actually aware of the legal jeopardy they were under.”
In another twist to the story, Denis says he was himself put under armed guard for a month while he was Alberta’s Conservative attorney general from 2012 to 2015, after a member of another pseudo-law group – the Freemen on the Land – made what police considered a credible death threat against him.
“This group (pseudo-law adherents) is not just an annoyance, they’re dangerous,” he said, though he stressed that Anderson was not involved in the threat against him.
The term pseudo law or “Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments (OPCA)” refers to various sets of ideas and rules that are stated in legalistic jargon and purport to override real statutes and jurisprudence, but have no basis in actual law. They’ve been used in Canada to evade taxes, flout child-custody orders and circumvent criminal charges.
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The phenomenon includes the “sovereign citizen” and “freeman on the land” movements, the “strawman theory” and a group that claims a section of the Magna Carta that’s been defunct for more than 800 years renders all laws in Commonwealth countries invalid.
And violence has sometimes ensued. A sovereign-law follower killed a tax-court judge and two other people in Ottawa in 2007. A man who espoused Freemen and Sovereign-citizen type views shot and killed an Edmonton police officer in 2015.
“The masses have been duped to believe Income Tax, Estate Tax, Probate Court, the Court in general, lawyers and their unlawful secular laws are applicable to the private sovereign person,” says the website the Andersons are being sued over.
Alberta courts have penalized Sandra Anderson numerous times in the last three years, with judges ordering hundreds of thousands of dollars removed from her father’s estate and put in trust to cover legal costs or fines she incurred. The estate is still in probate and has not been distributed.
The libel suit concerns a “public notice” on the angliclaw.com website which complains about court actions related to the Anderson estate. It accuses several lawyers and judges – whom it calls “unregistered foreign agents” – of embezzling funds from the estate and of lacking a moral compass.
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Though the site is not expressly tied to Sandra Anderson, Denis argued that her fingerprints are all over it, including in lengthy videos she recorded. She also served the notice itself on Docken, he said.
As for her sister Susan, a 2022 Court of King’s Bench ruling noted that she now seemed to be assisting Sandra, and warned that “negative consequences may follow if she continues those activities.”
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