R v Bradshaw: The principled approach to hearsay revisited

The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R v Bradshaw marks a major development in the evolution of Canada’s principled exception to hearsay. In this comment the authors criticise the court’s new approach to the admissibility of corroborative evidence. They argue 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