Thompson Rivers University

Chris Hunt and Micah Rankin on hearsay

  Posted on: January 18, 2018

In their article, “The Principled Approach to Hearsay Revisited” (2017) 2(1) International Journal of Evidence & Proof 68, Professors Hunt and Rankin examine the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R v Bradshaw which modified Canada’s principled exception to hearsay. They criticise the court’s new approach to the admissibility of corroborative evidence, arguing that the test is overly strict and is discordant with the common sense, functional approach previously endorsed by the court. They also urge caution about combining procedural and substantive reliability into a third or hybrid approach to threshold reliability.