Principled Approach Prevails

Omar Ha-Redeye was interviewed in the Lawyers Daily on Oct. 13, 2021 on the new Ontario Court of Appeal decision in R. v. Rowe, 2021 ONCA 684 (CanLII),

Hearsay is “a blanket exclusion of evidence, but that blanket has holes in it,” according to civil litigator Omar Ha-Redeye, who runs Fleet Street Law, a legal incubator in Toronto, and teaches at Ryerson University’s Lincoln Alexander School of Law.

“The biggest hole is what the Supreme Court of Canada created in 1990 when it introduced the principled exception [in R. v. Khan [1990] 2 S.C.R. 531] to tie together the common threads of reliability and necessity,” he explained.

Ha-Redeye said that in the Rowe case, the trial judge failed to conduct “a thorough enough analysis of the principled approach to hearsay” when he dismissed the Crown’s application to admit the videotaped statement in the trial for the truth of its contents.

“As far as I know, this is the first time the Ontario Court of Appeal has looked at the principled approach in hearsay evidence as it relates to videotaped testimony in its entirety and its subsequent recantation,” he added.