No Place for the State

The Origins and Legacies of the 1969 Omnibus Bill

in English, 300 pages,
UBC Press, April 15, 2020
Order here

“There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau told reporters. He was making the case for the most controversial of his proposed reforms to Canada’s Criminal Code, those concerning homosexuality, birth control, and abortion. In No Place for the State, contributors offer complex and often contrasting perspectives as they assess how the 1969 Omnibus Bill helped shape sexual and moral politics in Canada. Fifty years later, the origins and legacies of the bill are equivocal and the state still seems interested in sexual regulation. This incisive study explains why that matters.