On Sept. 26, 2025, the top court handed down reserved reasons for its unanimous oral judgment last April, which restored the six-year prison term that a trial judge imposed on ex-teacher Paul Sheppard for his repeated sexual abuse of a 12-year-old boarding school student in 1993 and 1994: R.v. Sheppard, 2025 SCC 29.
The Supreme Court held that the majority of the Alberta Court of Appeal wrongly cut Sheppard’s sentence to three years and 11 months because the appeal court erroneously determined that the sentencing judge at trial did not give sufficient reasons for her factual findings. The Supreme Court held that the appeal court below also erred by faulting the trial judge for not relying on the pre-Friesen sentencing jurisprudence on sexual crimes against children.
A jury found Sheppard guilty of sexual interference and invitation to sexual touching and the trial judge sentenced him to six years for each offence, to be served concurrently. Newly emerged evidence before the Supreme Court revealed that he had convictions for assault against children before he committed the offences against the complainant.
In R. v. Friesen, 2020 SCC 9, Chief Justice Richard Wagner and Justice Malcolm Rowe, co-writing for a unanimous court, instructed lower courts to be tougher when punishing sexual crimes against children. The court gave extensive detailed guidance on principles, considerations and factors that sentencing judges are to take into account, as well as on misconceptions and myths that they are to avoid.
Emphasizing that thousands of children each year suffer sexual violence, Chief Justice Wagner and Justice Rowe said in Friesen that the court’s reasons are “about how to impose sentences that fully reflect and give effect to the profound wrongfulness and harmfulness of sexual offences against children.”
In Sheppard, Chief Justice Wagner reiterated Friesen’s key message in his introductory paragraph, describing sexual offences against children as “among the most profoundly immoral acts an individual can commit.”
Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Richard Wagner
And while “sentencing judges are entitled to consider historical precedents,” they may do so “only insofar as they align with contemporary sentencing principles,” the chief justice stipulated.
Moreover, “this should not be taken to suggest that sentencing judges are required to consider such precedents or that declining to do so is an error in principle,” Chief Justice Wagner explained.
In Sheppard, the appeal court below erred in intervening on the basis that the sentencing judge failed to consider historical jurisprudence, the Supreme Court held.
“She was not required to do so and committed no error in her approach to sentencing for historical offences,” Chief Justice Wagner ruled.
The chief justice instructed that, as “this court’s decision in Friesen makes clear, society, the common law, and legislation have all undergone significant evolution in their treatment of sexual offences against children. Sentencing judges who rely on historical case law in fashioning a sentence for such offences should interpret the reasoning and dispositions in that case law through the lens of Friesen.”
Elaborated the chief justice, “While contemporary case law should guide the analysis, sentencing judges are entitled to consider dated case law insofar as it aligns with contemporary principles ... Generally speaking, the usefulness of a historical decision will depend on its factual comparability to the case at hand, as well as on the degree to which relevant legal principles, societal attitudes, and legislative provisions have evolved since the decision was rendered.”
For example, he wrote, “it is safe to assume that historical jurisprudence will not be useful, at least not on its face, when considering offences that are now viewed through a markedly different lens.”
Chief Justice Wagner also expressly agreed with the dissenting appellate judge below, Justice Michelle Crighton, and the intervener, Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, that “many of the issues” majority Justice Thomas Wakeling identified in his solo opinion “engage discredited myths and stereotypes.”
“This court has repeatedly and unequivocally held that ‘myths and stereotypes have no place in a rational and just system of law,’” Chief Justice Wagner pointed out. “In particular, the law no longer tolerates any suggestion that the complainant is less credible because they did not confront their abuser. As the Alberta Court of Appeal explained in R. v. A.R.D., 2017 ABCA 237 ... there is no single or expected way for victims of sexual abuse to behave, and their failure to distance themselves from their abuser cannot be taken to undermine their credibility ...”
Similarly, “the suggestion that the complainant’s history of undergoing therapy per se impugned their credibility or reliability is not tenable,” Chief Justice Wagner wrote. “Absent some reason to believe that the complainant’s recollection was distorted by therapy, the conclusion that the sentencing judge ought to have counted this as a reliability concern is wrong in law,” he said.
“Finally, I reject the idea that the complainant was less credible or reliable because they were already troubled and isolated at the time of the assaults or because they described their time at the boarding school as traumatic.”
“Far from undermining their reliability, the complainant’s testimony suggested that the respondent targeted them because they were troubled and isolated,” the chief justice said. “Certainly the complainant’s account of life at the boarding school as traumatic was not inconsistent with their allegations of sexual violence.”
The Supreme Court of Canada also remarked that Justice Wakeling’s approach to sentencing for sexual interference did not comply with Friesen’s instruction that courts should not conceptualize the severity of sexual offences in terms of a hierarchy of physical acts.
The Supreme Court said Justice Wakeling’s starting points for sexual interference established three subsets of the offence: the “most egregious” subset, “reserved for sexual assaults that most severely degrade the victim’s physical and psychological integrity — penile penetration of the victim’s vagina or anus”; the “more egregious” subset, which “captures fellatio, cunnilingus, penetration of the vagina or anus by an object or a body part other than the penis, and crimes in which the offender gropes the victim’s breast or genitals underneath clothing, causes the victim to touch the offender’s genitals, and undresses and exposes the victim”; and the “egregious” subset, which includes acts with the “same degree of seriousness as kissing and groping over clothes.”
“Appellate courts are entitled to identify subsets of an offence and to propose sentencing ranges that will generally be appropriate for those subsets,” Chief Justice Wagner wrote.
“However, dividing an offence like sexual interference into rigid subsets defined solely by the type of physical act committed, as Wakeling J.A. did here, runs counter to this court’s guidance in Friesen,” he said.
“Sentencing guidelines must be sufficiently flexible to accommodate the reality that ‘physical acts such as digital penetration and fellatio can be just as serious a violation of the victim’s bodily integrity as penile penetration’. Appellate courts exceed their proper role by attempting to dictate a range of sentences based solely on the type of act committed.”
Brian Beresh of Beresh Law in Edmonton, who with Hannah Hunter represented the respondent Sheppard, was out of office and not reached for comment. Matthew Griener, counsel for the successful appellant, the Alberta Crown Prosecution Service in Edmonton, hadn’t responded by press time to our request for comments.
Angela Marinos, chief general counsel with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, who argued the intervention for her client at the Supreme Court, welcomed the top court’s reasons for judgment.
The centre had asked the Supreme Court to specifically reject 10 “myths and misconceptions” it argued were evident in the appeal court’s majority decision, particularly in Justice Wakeling’s opinion, that “show a profound lack of understanding of sexual abuse and its impact on survivors.”
Angela Marinos, Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights
Marinos said the decision “sends a clear message to people who take advantage of, and prey on, vulnerable children that the passage of time doesn’t absolve them of responsibility for these crimes. They don’t get the benefit of archaic sentencing principles that may have been in effect when the crimes occurred.”
“In other words,” she added, “while there’s undeniably a Charter right to [not be sentenced in excess of] the maximum penalty at the time the offence was committed, there’s no Charter right to being sentenced from a time machine.”
Marinos said, “We need to apply our deeper, albeit imperfect but continually evolving, understanding of the harms, trauma and poison sexual violence inflict, and this decision is a significant step in that direction.”
“Survivors of sexual violence seeking justice often face a long road,” Marinos pointed out. “That road can be perilous and last a lifetime. In this case, it’s taken 32 years to get to this point. And today, I reflect on the 12-year-old kid whose childhood was ruptured by the sexual violence.”
“When you are sexually abused as a child, something inside you breaks,” she continued. “That part may forever feel broken. Certainly, your trust is broken and it may take a lifetime to try and heal from that rupture.”
There are certainly limits to what a judgment can accomplish, Marinos said. “But to the extent that a judgment can be a balm, this is that balm,” she said. “The Supreme Court of Canada righted the wrong today.”
Marinos said Chief Justice Wagner’s judgment is helpful to judges, Crowns and defence counsel. “The court clarified that the principles it articulated in Friesen also apply to historical sexual violence against children, so there can no longer be any doubt about that.”
Photo of Chief Justice Richard Wagner by SCC Collection.
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