WARNING: This story contains disturbing descriptions of child sex abuse. Resources and supports for anyone who has experienced sexual violence can be found at the bottom of this story.
A former P.E.I. substitute teacher who has already pleaded guilty to charges related to child sex abuse images and sexually touching a primary school student has now pleaded guilty to sexually touching another student at a different elementary school.
Matthew Craswell was first charged with possession and distribution of child pornography in the summer of 2024. He pleaded guilty last April in relation to those charges and sexually touching a student at Glen Stewart Primary School in Stratford, just east of P.E.I.’s capital, in 2024 — information that came to light during the RCMP investigation after the unrelated child pornography charges were laid.
That incident wasn’t reported to police at the time, and Craswell was allowed to continue teaching.
In the weeks after Craswell entered that first guilty plea, CBC News uncovered details about a similar incident at West Kent Elementary in Charlottetown in 2023. Charges were ultimately laid in connection with that incident in the summer of 2025, and on Monday Craswell pleaded guilty to sexual interference, which means touching a person under the age of 16 for a sexual purpose.
According to an agreed statement of facts, Craswell touched the female student — whose identity is protected by a publication ban — during a game of “hide the ruler” at the end of the school day, after the majority of the class had already been picked up by the school bus.
The teacher “took the rulers out of her pants pocket and, at the same time, touched the area of her breasts and her vagina,” according to the document.
Former substitute teacher Matthew Craswell facing new charge connected to 2023 West Kent incident
The student told a parent what happened, and that parent contacted school officials. In a statement to police nearly two years later, in June 2025, an official said they tried to contact Craswell directly about the complaint but he didn’t answer or return phone calls.
According to that official, they informed the parent that Craswell would be removed from the list of substitute teachers and that the P.E.I. Public Schools Branch would investigate.
According to the agreed statement of facts, parents of two other students who were in the same class also filed complaints at the time but they weren’t reported to police.
Much like the incident at Glen Stewart, the details of this incident only came to the attention of police in 2024 as a result of the RCMP investigation into the child pornography charges.
During that investigation, police found Craswell “engaged in extensive discussions online with other users about the subject of child pornography and intimate relationships with children,” the agreed statement of facts reads.
Craswell wrote several messages to another user detailing how he touched a student — later identified as the student at West Kent — “including by ‘touching her backside’ and putting his hands on her ‘crotch.’” Craswell also shared non-pornographic images he took of that child, as well as two other children.
When the child’s parent was contacted with this evidence in the summer of 2024, they declined to be interviewed by police out of concern for their child’s well-being. But that changed in the spring of 2025, when Craswell pleaded guilty to touching the child at Glen Stewart.
After Craswell’s crimes were made public, the Public Schools Branch told CBC News the two classroom incidents were connected only after he was arrested on the unrelated child pornography charges. It later came to light that a senior official with the PSB did know about both incidents and no longer works there for that reason.
In neither case were police or Child Protection Services officials contacted, even though P.E.I.’s Child Sex Abuse Protocol requires mandatory reporting of suspected cases of child sexual abuse.
CBC News has asked the Public Schools Branch for comment but has not yet received a response.
In an interview with CBC News last summer, before the details of this incident were made public, Public Schools Branch director Tracy Beaulieu said the PSB did its own investigations into both cases and found no evidence to suggest the incidents were sexual in nature.
CBC News also discovered that Craswell was accused of breaking into a female students’ dressing room at a swimming pool while working as a teacher in South Korea in 2018 and was the subject of an extradition request in connection with that allegation — information that wouldn’t have turned up in the vulnerable sector screening that was conducted before Craswell was hired to teach in P.E.I.
West Kent parent thought school reported 2023 incident to police; investigators were never called
The Public Schools Branch has since implemented a central reporting system and stepped up its reference checks for educational staff who have worked internationally.
Former P.E.I. chief justice David Jenkins is also carrying out a third-party review to look at how safety incidents are handled by the province’s education authorities and how Craswell was able to continue teaching. That report is expected to be made public.
Craswell remains in custody. He’s scheduled to undergo a sexual deviancy assessment in connection with the charges he pleaded guilty to last year.
There are resources and supports available to anyone who has experienced sexual violence:
