Politics & Power Quote by Pierre Trudeau

A government confident in its authority doesn’t need to rummage through your sheets. Trudeau’s line lands because it frames privacy not as a niche “lifestyle” concern but as a boundary condition for liberal democracy: the state can regulate harm, not morality. The bluntness of “no business” is doing heavy rhetorical work. It strips the bedroom of romance and turns it into jurisdictional territory, then declares it off-limits. That’s why the sentence still reads like a dare.

The context matters. Trudeau said this in 1967 while justifying reforms that decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults (alongside changes to divorce and abortion law). Canada was modernizing; the old alliance between criminal law and Christian social norms was being renegotiated in public. Trudeau’s intent wasn’t merely permissive; it was strategic. He recast a potentially explosive cultural fight as a question of administrative competence. Why should police, courts, and Parliament be conscripted into enforcing someone else’s private virtue?

The subtext carries both liberation and limitation. “Bedrooms of the nation” universalizes the claim, inviting straight, married Canadians to hear their own intimacy under threat, not just the marginalized groups most targeted by morality policing. It’s coalition-building by grammar. At the same time, the phrase implies a domesticated, private sphere: rights are safest when they’re discreet, behind closed doors. That tension - privacy as protection, privacy as containment - explains the quote’s enduring usefulness, and its blind spots, in today’s debates over sex work, reproductive autonomy, and queer visibility.