PLEASE NOTE: My strata blogs are for use on an as-needed basis. Some subject matter is disturbing, but it is not intended to be used in a malicious manner. I am seeking a reasonable level of accountability but would rather that it not be harmful to the parties named.

I would much rather delete all of my blogs and their contents than to have to live with the burdens created by the ongoing necessity of their existence.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Literature, Language, and Lawyers

Let no one think that flexibility and a predisposition to compromise is a sign of weakness or a sell-out. - Paul Kagame 

I respect binding law, but not  legal fiction.

Fiction is a betrayal of trust that is extremely COSTLY

While I trusted and relied on black letter law I learned that, when trouble comes, systemic barriers deny most people access to justice. Others take advantage of that and the effective lack of penalties - reducing the LAW to optional guidelines, unless enforced by the court - clause by clause - one life at a time.



Barriers to justice that I have direct personal knowledge of include:

UNAFFORDABLE legal FEES 

DELIBERATE delays - coupled with LIMITATION dates 

Discrimination and systemic BIAS
 

Human PHYSICAL and EMOTIONAL limitations
not shared by artificial "PERSONS" otherwise known as "corporations"

DISPARITY between solitary self-represented individuals
bullied and exhausted by relay-running groups of scofflaws
with power, money, lawyers... and litigation insurance  
 
CRUSHING personal cost RISK for failure only makes matters worse
b


misrepresentations and immunity to liability

and dangerous monopolies on the practice of law

  
For those few who can afford to hire a lawyer and bear the risk of COSTS, at the end of it all is fractional compensation for success that does little or nothing to deter future violations, and is often unenforceable without further litigation.

All too often the message to owners who try to rely on the law for protection is that the cost and risk is just NOT WORTH IT - it is better to quietly absorb the injury, loss, and expense and salvage whatever you can of  life.

July 7, 2016
For the legal profession legal fiction is the biggest source of business in existence.

It is created and perpetuated by those in power to make administrative rulings trump plain language, the Interpretation Act, and governing legislation spelled out in otherwise reliable English.

R v Verrerre, [1978] 2 SCR 838, stated:
[…] A deeming provision artificially imports into a word or an expression an additional meaning which they would not otherwise convey beside the normal meaning which they retain where they are used; it plays a function of enlargement analogous to the word “includes” in certain definitions; however, “includes” would be logically inappropriate and would sound unreal because of the fictional aspect of the provision. […]
This tortured practice makes the law unreliable and is a betrayal of trust.

For example, black means white where a person who is a NON-resident of Canada for years is deemed to a RESIDENT of Canada (gaining Canadian social benefits) because they own Canadian real estate (leaving it vacant and making home prices sky rocket), opened a Canadian bank account, joined an association and obtained a Canadian drivers license or where a corporation with everlasting life is deemed to be a natural person and corporate rollovers create unlimited deferrals of tax that are denied to a natural person. Worst of all, administrators, police, lawyers, and judges not only routinely distort plain language and the law as it is written, in doing so they disparage vulnerable innocents who are abused by those in power, treat them as inherently guilty despite proof to the contrary, and  insidiously nudge Canada into a dangerous state of increasing corruption.

Legal fiction is an abuse of process that twists statutes beyond recognition and brings the law into disrepute. It is seldom, if ever, justified, but officers of the court and administrators of justice use it as a convenience to declare that something exists, has certain properties, or has occurred - regardless of the truth of the matter. Contrary to the law, might makes right.

April 17, 2014

After the 2014 Annual General Meeting my thoughts turned to Sunridge Estates' history over 25 years, and the systemic political and legal alliances throughout the strata industry, as a comparison to my 1960’s junior high school required reading of dystopian novels depicting political situations. I recognize alarming similarities. The following are excerpts from the internet of some comments on stories from school.

LITERATURE

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Animal Farm is an allegorical and dystopian novel, which Orwell wrote from November 1943 – February 1944, when the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union was at its height and Stalin was regarded highly by the British people, a circumstance that Orwell hated. It was initially rejected by a number of British and American publishers and then delayed, before it became required reading in many schools.


"We was on the outside. We never done nothing, we never seen nothing."
- William Golding, Lord of the Flies, Ch.10
LORD OF THE FLIES, is a 1954 novel by Nobel Prize-winning English author about a group of British boys stuck on an uninhabited island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies

In Lord of the Flies, the whole book is about mob mentality. Does anyone really think each of those children would react the way they did individually? No. In a group, egged on by each other? Yes. Hence mob/group mentality:
Characters are driven by the group to make decisions surmounting their own personal inclinations. Eg: no single child really felt like killing piggy.

Decisions are not questioned because of group pressure. Morally wrong choices are made and not contradicted.
Actions are driven to extremes and inhibitions abandoned, out of lack of fear of reprisal. Mob mentality is further encouraged by this lack of external authority. Group dynamics are shown in the unquestioned acceptation of new leadership and authority symbols, releasing individuals from personal responsibility Failing methods of reinforcement of this new authority, they resort to group pressure (see various social outcasts in the book.)

LEGAL FICTION

The legal profession are a protected class who make things up(called legal fiction) in order to apply a legal rule in a way it was not designed to be used. This kind of misrepresentation serves to thwart the statutory rights of owners to obtain strata records, observe strata meetings, obtain repairs and maintenance paid for with their strata fees, share common property according to their unit entitlement, or live in peace. It injects ambiguity into plain language and upsets balanced rights and obligations, thwarting the fundamental purpose of the Strata Property Act as stated by the Legislature.

Legal fiction usually gets started with judges and is keenly adopted by lawyers, including those who write source books, all in a conflict of interest that plants seeds of artificial business for themselves and all kinds of damage and confusion for strata owners. Reprehensible corruptions of strata law, including the fee limits for strata records and the boundaries for property, both defined by statute, create an ever-more destructive ripple that has become an intractable problem that is systemic in nature. The worst examples of legal fiction that I have seen are in strata industry.

LAWYERS

Strata lawyers make matters worse by manipulating law and language in bad faith, acting in obvious conflicts of interest that are dangerous and destructive, and they are protected by the court from compensating for failure to take reasonable care to avoid causing foreseeable damage.

This immunity is stated by by the Court of Appeal in Holland v. Douglas, 2010 BCCA 345, at para. 13, “a lawyer owes a duty of care only to his or her client and cannot be sued for consequences that may be suffered by other parties as the result of the lawyer’s doing his or her job.” This sounds similar to the Nuremberg defense, and I doubt if any statutory authority for it actually exists.

Although I suspect that the old boys club is the source for lawyers being a protected class, I know that it is systemically entrenched and not likely to change any time soon. Even Shakespeare said "kill all the lawyers" and jokes such as, "What are a thousand lawyers at the bottom on the ocean called? Answer: A good start" are popular for good reason. What a crying shame.


Sunridge Estates has hired strata lawyers who promote conflict and confusion, to their own enrichment. These lawyers shirk responsibility for making false statements and defamatory misrepresentations, bully bodily injury victims with threats, and claim to owe no duty to the strata owners who pay for and rely in good faith on their professional advice.

Strata lawyers get away with disregarding material facts and use their influence to launch perverse attacks in response to complaints about unfair acts and governance that raise a reasonable apprehension of misconduct. They make accusations of harassment and malice against the hapless victim of unfair persecution, provoking court proceedings at ruinous cost. It’s more than careless mistake. It's a devastating breach of trust.

Lawyers write "without prejudice" as a claim of "privilege" that prevents disclosure to the court of content that could influence a judge, particularly offers, admissions, or misrepresentations which could be inconvenient. It avoids telling the court the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Even worse, lawyers exploit an unjust monopoly on the practice of law by writing "without prejudice except as to costs" - which acts to intimidate and pressure victims to forego a just settlement by adding a threat to transfer the cost of exorbitant legal fees - a luxury that the self-represented litigant could never themselves afford. Worst of all, lawyers rely on privilege and limitation dates to further exclude evidence of misrepresentations, corruption, or their client's own inexcusable delays and avoid compensating for foreseeable damages.

Before I sought non-judicial resolutions the defendants  in http://bond-v-nw2671.blogspot.ca/ refused to communicate honestly, or at all - now it's "without prejudice". Their power to conceal, mislead, and engage in unconscionable delays, or the possibility of ruining me completely with litigation costs seemed just too tempting to resist. I am constantly hoping against hope that this will change.

AUTHORITIES
A primary source of the history of strife that bedevils strata corporations arises quite foreseeably out of the authorities.  The Condominium Act was so badly worded that even judges were confused to the point of creating case law in conflict with the Act, and strata corporations that are chronically bedeviled, thereby contributing to further confusion, damage, and waste.

For example, in Mackin v Strata Plan 1374 (1998), 65 B.C.L.R. (3d) 340 (S.C.) both sides said “we don’t do windows” and the court held that owners were responsible for repairing the glass and caulking and keeping the window sealed, and strata corporations were responsible for replacing window casings and sills, without considering the foreseeable impact on leaky condos, or how an owner could replace window caulking in a high-rise.
LANGUAGE
The wording and sections of the Condominium Act had to be tied together to see that the center of the floor, wall or ceiling (not the center of window glass as suggested by the court) forms the “boundary” of a “strata lot” and much of buildings, including windows and doors and areas allocated to exclusive use that are NOT “comprised” in a strata lot, are common property. In (115) an owner was required to repair and maintain his strata lot, reasonable wear and tear excepted, and in (116) the strata corporation was required to maintain and repair the exterior of the buildings, excluding windows included in a strata lot – which depended on the location of the relevant windows in relation to the strata lot’s defined boundaries. Basically repair and maintenance of windows was a divided obligation - based on boundaries.
 
In tortured reasons that wandered all over foreign jurisdictions the court read sections 115 and 116 with ludicrously placed emphasis based on injecting legal fiction into the definition of the boundaries of a strata lot and distorting the Act's reasonable wear and tear exclusions and then awarded COSTS. That is just ONE example of how badly the Condominium Act was worded, and why it is still so very dangerous for an owner to litigate.

HARASS:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harassment
Harassment covers a wide range of behaviours of an offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behaviour intended to disturb or upset, and it is characteristically repetitive. In the legal sense, it is intentional behaviour which is found threatening or disturbing.

I AM DEFENDING AGAINST a wide range of INTENTIONAL behaviours by strata corporation agents, including strata’s councils, lawyers and managers, repeated for more than a decade that are more than threatening to safety and security and disturbing to peace of mind, they create or contribute to significant damage and measureable loss. Examples include:
unreported decisions, blocked communication, false information, and nondisclosure of material facts,
repeatedly calling me vile, despicable, and crazy for defending myself or pursuing my rights,
publishing defamatory statements about me in minutes, meetings, letters, and emails,
continually depriving me of access to common property,
shirking and offloading legally mandated repairs and maintenance,
destroying trees and landscaping in full knowledge of the loss and heartbreak to me,
sabotaging Unit 409’s patio and taps for years in full knowledge of the enormous loss to me,
spending my strata fees on others for extra benefits created through legal violations,
damaging Unit 409, creating major ongoing expense, and offloading the cost onto me,
unfair conduct inconsistent with law, betraying my trust, and bringing the law into disrepute.
Systemic policies put in practice by a power alliance explain why lawyers will not represent strata owners on a contingency basis. It is NOT a level playing field; I think everyone in the industry knows it, and the powerful rely on it with impunity. The strata is ganging up on me and depriving me of my rights, NOT the other way around. Mob mentality is encouraged by a basic lack of external authority in strata corporations.

The persistent accusations of harassment launched against me by the strata for pursuing my statutory and common law rights in the most reasonable and accessible ways within my means are perverse. Lawyers attacking me for defending my rights instead of correcting those who persistently offend them contribute to a mix of shocking and insidious actions and decisions that sabotage the peace and enjoyment of strata life and drive people to sell. The whole process is more than disturbing, it spoils my enjoyment of life, makes me ill, and undermines my ability to earn a living. It goes far beyond the threat of harm, it is actual, prolonged, repeated, and measurable loss.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/malice
MALICE: desire to inflict injury, harm, or suffering on another, evil intent on the part of a person who commits a wrongful act injurious to others.

My cousins says that you are only as sick as your secrets. I agree. I believe that this is true for artificial entities like governments and strata corporations also. Please don’t ask me to keep your secrets.

Malice is toxic and destructive, and I don’t think I could stand to live here if I held malice in my heart. In fact, what sustains me is the exact opposite. I truly believe that acts and decisions that people feel guilty about and hide under cloaks of “privacy” “secrecy” or “conspiracy” are damaging to ALL, and denying the truth or running away from it does more harm than good, in general, and over the long run especially.

Having said that, I am a tattletale. Always have been; probably always will be; but its from caring, not from malice.

Lawyers should look at themselves before they make accusations against others, and be held accountable for foreseeable damages arising out of reckless accusations. I don’t act out of malice. I tattle to hold people who play harmful “roles” accountable for their acts and to create a better world.

I am not an artificial entity like a strata corporation, I am a living person. If you hurt me it will show. If you attack me I will attack you back. If you gang up on me you will beat me. If you delay justice long enough it is a certainty that I will die. AND If you lie, I will tattle - even if nobody is listening - because I know no better way, and I know in my core that it is the right thing for me to do.