The Crown sought to admit out-of-court statements made by a four-year-old child alleging child abuse.
The statements were hearsay and presumptively inadmissible.
The defence challenged whether threshold reliability had been established, arguing the statements were inconsistent, lacked a promise to tell the truth, and had never been subject to cross-examination.
The court applied the principled approach to hearsay and found the statements substantively reliable based on the circumstances in which they were made, the open-ended questioning, the identity of the recipients as trusted individuals, the temporal proximity to the alleged assault, and corroborating physical evidence.
The court admitted all of the child's utterances, including inconsistent statements, for trial.
