Crown urges new trial in B.C. sex assault case, tossed over delays in 2025

VANCOUVER — The B.C. Court of Appeal has reserved judgment in a sexual assault case that was tossed out last year over delays, with Crown counsel and defence lawyers pointing fingers about who was responsible for derailing the case.

A provincial court judge in April 2025 stayed the case against a Vancouver Island man whose name is under a publication ban, finding that the case hadn’t gone to trial by a deadline set by the Supreme Court of Canada’s so-called Jordan ruling.

The 2016 Jordan ruling imposed “a presumptive ceiling” of 18 months between charge and the actual or anticipated end of a trial in provincial court, and 30 months in superior courts.

It has since led to hundreds of cases being tossed.

The accused in the case under appeal on Friday had been charged with sexual assault against one complainant, and assault against another woman for alleged offences in June 2023.

His trial had been scheduled to begin in February 2025, and the Jordan deadline was set to expire in late March that year.

Crown counsel Lara Vizsolyi sought to explain the delays by saying prosecutors were between a “rock and a hard place” when they were ordered to disclose thousands of text messages from a complainant’s phone that had been seized by police.

Vizsolyi told a three-judge panel of the B.C. Court of Appeal that the privacy rights of the complainants would’ve been “extinguished” had prosecutors complied with the order to give them to the defence.

“You can’t take that back once you disclose it,” she said.

The complainants in the case had their own lawyers, and Vizsolyi said that they had indicated they were going to apply to challenge the order to disclose the messages, but that application was never heard.

There were also funding issues with one of the complainants lawyers, she said, and argued the judge was wrong to order the disclosure, and said the judge’s “ultimate ruling” was exceptional, novel and “contrary to 25 years of jurisprudence.”

She said the Crown perhaps could or should have done differently, but it has to “balance a lot of different interests.”

“The Crown represents the public interest and extinguishing the complainants’ privacy rights by simply handing over private text messages, some of which were ultimately going to be disclosed, but many of which were not, was not something the Crown was prepared to do instantaneously,” she said.

She said disclosing the texts as ordered would’ve caused “irreversible harm.”

Justice Harvey Groberman said he agreed that the ruling on its face appeared to be wrong, but the “Supreme Court of Canada has said that you follow court orders until they are stayed or are overturned.

“Now you’re asking us here to presume that the judge’s decision was wrong, but it hasn’t been directly challenged,” he said.

Vizsolyi told the panel that prosecutors were in a difficult situation after the court ordered the text messages to be disclosed, and they tried to give the complainants time to challenge the order.

Defence lawyer Tony Paisana said the delays that led to the case being tossed were not the fault of the defence, and the text messages were potentially important evidence showing the complainants “conspired to lie to police.”

The provincial court judge’s ruling said the Crown had not claimed there were exceptional circumstances or delays caused by the defence, and he was not told why prosecutors hadn’t completed disclosure as the trial and deadline approached.

Paisana says it was unfair for the Crown to now “suggest that this is all the defence’s fault.”

“You have to identify a period of time at which you can say, ‘this is the defence’s fault,’ and the Crown hasn’t even really done that.”

Defence lawyer Sarah Pringle told the panel that the case was not of great complexity and the lower court judge made no “palpable and overriding error.”

“This trial went off the rails not because of the defence, not because of an extraordinary remedy that was contemplated and not because of complexity, but because there was a disclosure problem in the genesis of this prosecution that tainted the entire proceedings,” she said.

Pringle urged the court to dismiss the appeal and uphold the trial judge’s decision.

The court heard that procedural issues that arose from the order to disclose the phone evidence had a “cascading” effect on the delays.

“Was the Crown’s conduct perfect? No. Was the complainants’ conduct perfect? No,” Vizsolyi told the panel. “But everyone was thrown into an extremely difficult situation with a very tight timeline in which to make difficult and complicated decisions.”

Vizsolyi urged the panel to allow the appeal and order a new trial, and the court reserved its decision when the hearing concluded.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 15, 2026.

Darryl Greer, The Canadian Press