DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

No Place for the State

The Origins and Legacies of the 1969 Omnibus Bill

Christabelle Sethna editor Christopher Dummitt editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of British Columbia Press

Published:15th Oct '20

Should be back in stock very soon

No Place for the State cover

No Place for the State is an incisive study that offers complex and often contrasting perspectives on the Trudeau government’s 1969 Omnibus Bill and its impact on sexual and moral politics in Canada.

“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 the 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 by examining the bill’s origins, social implications, and repercussions. The new legal regime had significant consequences for matters like adoption, divorce, and suicide. After the bill passed, a great many Canadians continued to challenge how sexual behaviour was governed, demanding much more exhaustive changes to the law. Fifty years later, the origins and legacies of the bill are equivocal and the state still seems interested in the bedrooms of the nation. This incisive study explains why that matters.

ISBN: 9780774862431

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 740g

300 pages