A Moosomin man who claims to be above the law found out he is not in Yorkton Court of Queen's Bench March 10.
Gerald Wilfrid Joseph Blerot, 60, a self-proclaimed "natural person" and "human being" was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison on Monday for evading taxes and counseling others to do the same.
During the proceedings against him dating to August 2011, Blerot refused to acknowledge the authority of the court and did not participate in the trial except to occasionally submit motions in an attempt "to establish that as a natural person with inherent jurisdiction, the Crown had no ability to continue the prosecution against him," according to Justice Ronald Mills.
On January 10, Mills found Blerot guilty of five counts under the Income Tax Act and Excise Tax Act.
The first two charges applied to income he earned as an "educator" for the Paradigm Education Group (PED), a scheme that teaches people to evade taxes. The Crown proved "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Blerot had failed to report income of nearly $275,000 for the 2006 to 2009 taxation years thus evading paying more than $44,000 in income tax and nearly $14,000 in GST remissions.
The third count involved counseling Bienfait businessman Jerry McCaw to evade almost $100,000 in taxes between 2006 and 2008. McCaw was sentenced in April 2013 to 14 months in jail.
Counts 4 and 5 alleged Blerot had defrauded the Canadian government of $1.6 million by helping 57 unnamed individuals evade taxes through his PED seminars. While Justice Mills ruled the Crown had failed to establish beyond a reasonable doubt the amount of unpaid taxes, he found that the actual amount was "inconsequential" to a guilty verdict as the Crown had proven the essential elements of the crime.
The PED scheme operates on the premise that, for tax purposes, an individual is two separate people, the natural person who earns income and the legal person who is a creation of the federal government. Tax protesters, or "detaxers" maintain that while the legal person is required to file a tax return, the income belongs to the natural person and is therefore not subject to income tax.
As Blerot found out this week, the Canada Revenue Agency and courts do not recognize the distinction.
