Anti-Authority and Militia Movements in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract

 
 
 Academic explorations of anti-authority movements are virtually non- existent in Canada. We have no reliable primary data or empirical insights into Freemen-on-the-Land (FOTL) or other similar contingents. What we do know comes largely from Associate Chief Justice Rooke’s decision in Meads v. Meads (2012). He refers to the loose collection of individuals and small cells as “vexatious litigants.” In the absence of any academic assessment of these movements, we embarked on a one-year pilot project, bringing an exploratory and multi-method approach to this first such study. It is grounded in interviews with law enforcement, lawyers, judges, notaries, and movement adherents (n = 32), along with analysis of open source data which included media reports, court documents, and movement websites.
 In terms of distribution of the movement, the largest concentrations appeared to be in British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario. Quantitatively, participants noted the challenge in measuring how expansive adherence to the movement might be. Most, however, roundly rejected the oft-cited estimate of 30,000, suggesting instead numbers closer to 5,000 to 10,000. Another shift in thinking that emerged over the course of our study was that the “movement” we were examining was slightly more diffuse than simply the FOTL bloc. It is, instead, a broadly-based anti-state or anti-authority movement consisting of many diverse, and frequently contradictory arms. In fact, some adherents explicitly distanced themselves from the FOTL label, while others embraced ideologies and practices that bore only passing resemblance to FOTL specifically.
 
 
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".