WILLIAMS LAKE (CANADA)
Investigative Journalism Foundation [Toronto, Canada]
August 6, 2025
By Rochelle Becker and Bethany Lindsay
Judge who found Bishop Hubert O’Connor guilty says concept of ‘genuine consent’ decided trial
When Bishop Hubert O’Connor stood trial in the 1990s for rape and indecent assault, he was one of the first Catholic clergymen in Canada to be charged with sexual offences committed at a residential school.
Court documents and records in the IJF’s residential schools database show that the case against him was ultimately sunk by legal questions over how to determine consent in the context of young Indigenous students and staff facing sexual advances by a respected religious leader.
O’Connor was found guilty of raping a teenage former student working as a secretary at St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School in B.C. in the 1960s. In his 1996 ruling, then-B.C. Supreme Court Justice Wally Oppal wrote he could not conclude she was able to consent. But that ruling was later overturned by a panel of appeal court justices, who disagreed with Oppal’s ruling that consent obtained by the exercise of authority was not genuine.
Speaking publicly about the case for the first time, Oppal told the IJF the questions at the centre of the O’Connor trial are ones that have animated sexual assault prosecutions for decades, and continue to be strikingly relevant today.
Like many people accused of sexual offences — from Sean “Diddy” Combs to the Hockey Canada players — O’Connor did not deny there was sex, but insisted it was consensual.
“What the case really turned on was genuine consent,” said Oppal, who has also served as a B.C. Court of Appeal justice, the province’s attorney general and commissioner for the inquiry into the Robert Pickton murders.
“One of the issues that arose in O’Connor and arises in other cases is, where a person is a person in authority, is there a power imbalance? Those types of cases may lead to consent that’s obtained by improper means.”
While he stressed that it would be inappropriate to comment on the facts of the case or the appeal court decision, Oppal said these questions often pop up during trials involving priests, teachers or other authority figures.
“A typical case may involve a young person, a complainant, who felt that she gave consent to the sexual act that took place, but she only gave it because of the authority figure that was there and the authority figure is one that overwhelmed her, prevented her from having real consent,” he said.
Isabel Grant, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, put it plainly.
“There is no consent when agreement is induced by an authority figure,” she said.
In 1985, the Criminal Code was amended to make clear that there is no consent when “the accused induces the complainant to engage in the activity by abusing a position of trust, power or authority.”
Oppal said that in the years since O’Connor’s alleged crimes, there have been some improvements in how the legal system treats victims of sexual assault. For one thing, defence lawyers are no longer allowed to question complainants about their sexual history.
“We did not want to discourage women from coming forward and complaining about these acts that took place against them without their consent, because the old law had a real effect of discouraging people from coming forward,” he said.
‘We knew our place’
O’Connor’s history at St. Joseph’s is laid out in documents from the IJF’s database, Residential Schools: The Hidden Stories, which detail his time as principal of the residential school in Williams Lake, B.C., also known as Cariboo Residential School, from 1961 to 1967.
In 1991, he was charged with multiple sex crimes against students and Indigenous women who had worked in the institution.
O’Connor was the third Catholic cleric to be accused of sexual misconduct in residential schools, the first being Father Harold McIntee, who pleaded guilty to 17 counts of sexual assault, followed by Oblate Brother Glenn Doughty, who would eventually be convicted of dozens of sex crimes.
Though the allegations against O’Connor were shocking, Oppal said, “the circumstances that took place in O’Connor are not all that unusual in view of the myriad allegations and facts that were proven about the abuses that took place in these schools.”
O’Connor’s first trial on four counts of rape and indecent assault began in 1992, but the charges were stayed over non-disclosure of records by the Crown. The Supreme Court of Canada eventually ordered a new trial, which began in B.C. Supreme Court in 1996.
Standing in Oppal’s courtroom, O’Connor faced two charges of rape and two of indecent assault against women who had been students or former students-turned staff members at the time of the alleged offences.
During the trial, O’Connor claimed he had consensual relations with both alleged rape victims and that “the indecent assault offences simply did not occur” with the other two complainants, according to Oppal’s decision.
On the stand, the women described O’Connor as having great authority. One told the court she had been taught to respect and obey the nuns and priests by her grandmother, as they were authority figures. Another said “we knew our place.”
In his decision, Oppal found O’Connor guilty of raping a 19-year-old secretary who’d previously been a student at St. Joseph’s. She testified that during the first assault, O’Connor asked her to come to his room so he could give her a Christmas present, but instead he asked her to sit on the bed and remove her clothes; she said she complied because she was terrified and thought she might lose her job.
There were as many as a dozen other sexual encounters after that, and she would later discover she was pregnant.
“Her apparent failure to resist his advances is entirely understandable when one considers their relative backgrounds and positions,” Oppal wrote. “The complainant went to a residential school when she was six years old. As a Catholic, she was taught to respect and obey the priests who were authority figures. Father O’Connor was not only her priest but was also her employer.”
Oppal also found O’Connor guilty of one of the counts of indecent assault, but acquitted him of the other two charges.
The other alleged rape victim was also impregnated by O’Connor, according to the decision. When the baby was put up for adoption, he filled out paperwork falsely claiming the father was an “accountant.” Oppal ultimately found, however, that there were too many discrepancies in the woman’s evidence to convict.
O’Connor appealed the convictions, and in 1998, the B.C. Court of Appeal ordered a new trial on the rape charge, writing that Oppal “did not resolve the issue of consent.” The judgment states that under the Criminal Code at the time of the alleged rape, consent could not be negated by the fact that the perpetrator was in a position of power.
The court entered an acquittal on the indecent assault charge, finding the verdict unreasonable because O’Connor had not been in Williams Lake at the time.
Regardless of the court’s decisions surrounding the accusations against O’Connor and whether consent had been given freely or was coerced, the Indigenous community had a different perspective on justice.
One complainant, Marilyn Belleau, told reporters she was tired of “being victimized by the courts.” Instead, the alleged victims turned to restorative justice, where they could sit with O’Connor and explain how his actions affected their lives. Thus, a seven-hour healing circle commenced in 1998.
In a Vancouver Sun article about the healing circle included in an addendum to the school narrative about St. Joseph’s in the IJF database, Belleau said O’Connor looked uncomfortable throughout the entire process, and while she didn’t believe the apology he gave was genuine or an admission of guilt, the circle was necessary for her community to move forward and become stronger.
There would never be another trial. Crown prosecutors stayed the remaining rape charge after O’Connor’s apology.
As for O’Connor, following his time at St. Joseph’s, he went on to become the bishop for the Diocese of Prince George, B.C., a position he would resign after he was criminally charged.
Despite the plethora of credible accusations thrown his way, O’Connor retained the honorific of “most reverend” and held his title of Bishop Emeritus, essentially a retired bishop, until his death in 2007. He was buried alongside his brother priests at the Oblates of Mary Immaculate Cemetery in Mission, B.C.
When asked how a bishop could retain his titles after such horrific accusations had been posed against him, Adam Exner, the former archbishop of Vancouver, said in a 1996 Vancouver Sun article in the St. Joseph’s addendum, “Ordination is something like baptism. Once you are baptized, you cannot become unbaptized. Once you are ordained, you cannot become unordained.”