Judge dismisses charter challenge in sex-assault case

A Yorkton man who admitted to multiple sexual encounters with a 14-year-old girl he met while driving her school bus has been convicted of sexual assault and sexual touching after a judge dismissed his argument that Canada’s age of consent laws are unconstitutional.

The man, who was 22 at the time of the offences and is identified in court documents only as T.A.S, was acquitted of a third charge — inviting a sexual encounter with a person under the age of 16 — after the judge concluded that the girl initiated the encounters.

The criminal code states that a person between the ages of 14-16 can only give consent to sexual activity if the other person involved is less than five years older.

T.A.S. argued this provision is “overbroad” and “grossly disproportionate” in its effects compared to its purpose.

In a decision handed down earlier this month, Queen’s Bench Justice Brian Barrington Foote dismissed T.A.S.’s argument that the law was intended not to prohibit sexual relationships, but to criminalize exploitative ones.

“T.A.S. was more than eight years her senior. He was her bus driver for three years,” Barrington-Foote wrote in the decision, noting that the man’s account of the relationship demonstrated “that she was exactly the sort of child who was unable to give true consent.”

Barrington-Foote also dismissed T.A.S.’s argument that the law would result in him being convicted, designated as a sex offender and given a mandatory minimum sentence “for being a passive participant in conduct which he did not seek out.”

“This is not spitting on the street. This is the sexual assault and sexual touching of a child. The connection between the impact of the law and its object is not … ‘entirely outside the norms accepted in our free and democratic society,’ ” the judge wrote.

According to the decision, the relationship began with a text message to T.A.S. from the girl in June 2014, after she had switched to a different bus route.

T.A.S. testified the girl “hounded” him, despite his requests that she stop sending him texts.

At one point, according to the decision, the girl told T.A.S. that she blocked the numbers of boys at her school who asked her for nude pictures. T.A.S. testified that he then asked her for a nude picture, hoping she would stop texting him, but she sent the picture instead.

The relationship escalated to involve encounters on the man’s school bus, offers of marriage and threats of suicide. Between September 2014 and January 2015, there were four meetings during which they undressed, touched each other, and on two occasions had oral sex.

There was evidence that T.A.S. — who was arrested after the fourth encounter — grew up in an extremely strict Catholic household and was affected by his father’s alcoholism and traumatic events in his childhood, according to the decision.

T.A.S., who testified that he contemplated suicide during the relationship, used that evidence to claim “he had a limited capacity to understand and resist the complainant’s single-minded pursuit of what would become his first sexual relationship,” the decision states.

A psychologist and a psychiatrist concluded that while T.A.S. had “limited coping resources and is prone to feelings of anxiety and depression,” he wasn’t suffering from a mental disorder that would prevent him from standing trial.